By Rajan Narayan

IT was the Goan winter of 2000. Pankajbala R Patel, also alias Tara Narayan, was on an annual holiday to Goa. Every time she came to Goa she would call me and ask me whether I could give her a job in Goa. I was then the editor of the OHeraldo. I would brush her off saying salaries in the media in Goa were pathetic, she was earning more money in Bombay. That I could not match the salaries of the Bombay newspapers.
At that time Tara was working for the Afternoon Despatch & Courier, an afternoon daily edited by Behram Contractor in Bombay, now Mumbai. We were just acquaintances. Apparently, when I was editing a fortnightly called Onlooker in Mumbai in the early 1970s she had come to meet me to submit a short story she had written for publication. She had just completed a course in journalism from the KC College of Journalism. The short story which I told her to leave on my table was about several ways of committing suicide, obviously she was very depressed. I liked the story and published it in the Onlooker.
For her, it was a very important event. It was her first published short story and way back in 1975. I published the short story and forgot about it and her altogether. But she remembered me, never forgot me in gratefulness. She followed my progress in journalism and when I shifted to Goa, held me in high regard and admiration as one of Bombay’s most successful editors.
LATER, whenever she visited me while holidaying in Goa and I could not give her a job in the Oheraldo, on one occasion she requested me to give her an interview. I reluctantly agreed to do so although I don’t like to be written about. Tara came to my underground basement flat at Dona Paula in Panjim, returned to Mumbai, her very flattering interview with me appeared in the The Afternoon Dispatch & Courier.
I was amused enough to call her up in Mumbai to thank her. She again ask me for a job in Goa. She had fallen in love with Goa and wanted to relocate. I had been living alone for over decade since the divorce from my first wife Bhanu. There was a big vacuum in my life. I told her that while I could not offer her a job I could marry her which would enable her to relocate in Goa. She laughed it all and did not take it seriously.
Later that night I called her up again and told her I was proposing to her. She told me I was probably drunk and I should call her back the next morning if I was serious. The next morning I called her up again and I was sober and was still interested in marrying her. I was 52 and she almost 50 years. Perhaps too late in the day to get married.
Tara had avoided marriage because according to her, her parents had forced her to come to India from Penang in Malaysia to get married to a country Gujarati boy in 1970. Absurdly enough she was on strike in protest against her parents’ decision, especially her father whom she had mixed feelings about.
Apparently in the 1950s and 1960s the conservative Gujarati community in Penang was shocked because one of the young girls of marriageable age had eloped with a local Malay Muslim boy…shocking the whole community. Those years girls parents abroad used to come to India to look for grooms for their daughters brought up abroad and came to be of marriageable age. Grooms from the same community naturally.
Tara, born Pankajbala R Patel, in Gujarat, had gone out as a four-year old with her mother to Penang to join her father there in Penang…she studied and grew up there where her parents were immigrants, 16 years in Penang.
BUT her parents didn’t want her to marry any of her racially mixed group of friends in Penang, with whom she was running around wild or so to speak. So when one of the Gujarati girl eloped some parents panicked and sent of their daughters to India to get married…never mind what their daughters wanted. So Pankajbala alias Tara came to Bombay, to live with an aunt’s family in Chembur until a suitable Gujarati groom could be found for her to marry and settle down. In conservative Indian homes parents think it is necessary to marry off young girls at the right age and this is true in many countries around the world.
However, in a couple of years time Tara left her aunt and uncle’s house in Chembur, she had got a secretarial diploma from Davar’s College and moved to living in various working women’s hostels, down town Bombay; later she did evening school in journalism at the KC College of Journalism and switched careers, doing her apprentice training at the evening tabloid paper of The Times of India, courtesy KC College teacher Patanjali Sethi.
She went on to work as a journalist for the next 30 years from Minoo Masani’s Freedom First to Vinod Mehta’s Debonair, to Mid-Day to The Daily to The Afternoon Despatch & Courier in Bombay which was re-named Mumbai.
To cut a romantic or unromantic story short I proposed to Pankajbala Tara Patel and we spent a few days at the Bambolim Beach Resort which was owned by my friend Vero Nunes. I went to the airport to pick up Tara wearing my cream silk kurta…in those days I was a chain smoker. I was so nervous waiting for her in the arrival lounge in Dabolim airport that I did not realise my cigarette in hand was burning a hole in my silk kurta. She noticed it and helped me rectify the matter.
Initially, we were nervous with each other. But soon as we relaxed and were more comfortable. I confess that I was strongly physically attracted to her and I believe all Indian man have a breast fixation. Perhaps they do not get enough of their mother’s breast when they were children. Certainly the fact that Tara was generously buxom was a factor in the attraction for me. Her spontaneity was also a major part of the charm.
THIS was a contrast to my super analytical mind which dissected every feeling and emotion. Our location at the beach resort was ideal and romance blossomed you may say, our room faced the beach and Tara was a natural sun, sea and sand person. Within a few days we decided we were emotionally and physically compatible.
She returned to Bombay, I proposed over the phone, she happily accepted. We got married in Bombay and she settled down in my underground basement flat in at Dona Paula in Panjim; the first people I introduced to her was my Man Friday friend Ashraf with his wife Nalini who were taking care of me. I had considered having a registered marriage in Goa but Tara was keen on a simple Arya Samaj marriage with her family present and her mother, annoyed that she was getting married so late in life when her hair was turning white.
Other things I recall are buying her a golden silk pant suit and jacket from Madam Butterfly, also a mangalsutra to prove that I was serious about marriage. I remember her mother did not much like the idea of her daughter marrying a poor Madrasi journalist, although her sister Shobha, whom I was familiar with, was very supportive. Captain Krishnan Nair of Leela Hotels was Shobha’s boss and a good friend of mine.
The marriage took place with a small ceremony at Tara’s home in Juhu, Bombay. My sister Lalita or Lally and a common friend Prabha Krishnan, helped organize the Arya Samaj ceremony.The Arya Samaj is a liberal organisation which has no problems about inter-caste and intercommunity marriages. Like in Hindu marriages, they also have a havan but there are only four instead of the seven phera of the traditional Hindu marriage.
MY good friend Ramesh Khanna offered me a suite at the 5-star Holiday Inn in Juhu for a few nights. On my side I only had my sister Lalita, brother Vaidyanathan, and my mother. I remember a moment when Tara’s mother was more concerned about the smoke from the ceremonial havan fire affecting the ceiling of the living room in the flat. But the ceremony was mercifully short and soon we were tied up in marriage. Tara’s mother gave me her late husband’s solid gold ring. I gave Tara her mangalsutra which I had bought in Goa. There was in impromptu reception and another one at the Holiday Inn the next day for some of our close friends. They included the former retired chief justice of the Allahabad High Court Ferdinho Rebello and his wife Delfina. There was Anusuya, the best known divorce lawyer in Mumbai, with her partner Gopal. My old comrades Nandita, married to software engineer Pravin Gandhi was there and so was Tara’s lovely friend Munmum Ghosh, Shobha’s friend Padma. The hotel party was a late affair and Tara went off to drop Munmun home, when she returned to the hotel room I was fast asleep and she was tired. No suhag raat. In any case we had already ensured that we were physically compatible we got married.
A week later back in Goa I don’t think Tara was very happy about living in my rather run down underground basement flat. We had another party of our friends in Goa at the terrace of my friend Vaidihee Naik’s hotel terrace just opposite my basement flat at Dona Paula. All my close friends were there including Mario da Miranda with wife Habiba, Dr Sidney Pinto Rosario…in true Goan tradition the live music band of Dilip Chico played, he later migrated to New Zealand.
Tara had brought only a small part of her jewelry with her when she came to Goa to live with me as my wife. Those days I did not worry too much about security as there was nothing to steal in my flat. Perhaps in carelessness, we did not lock the door leading to the balcony. About a month after we married we got up late as though from a drugged sleep. The bread man was honking his upstairs on the street and Tara who likes Goa’s poie looked for money to run up and buy some bread. No money in her bag, she looked in my wallet – no money. Where’s all the money gone? She woke me up and I said there’s always money in my wallet. She realised the cupboard door was open, I asked her check the locker. Her gold jewelry was gone, all the money in my coat pocket in the wardrobe, including some new underwear she had bought me…some folk had come in, drugged the air, stole whatever they wanted, made tea for themselves in the kitchen, before absconding, leaving a coffee mug outside near the soak pits adjacent to the basement flat.
The robbery took place while we were heavily in sedated sleep. I realised that we have been robbed, called the police, the police came with their alsation dogs, picked up the trail right up to the Dona Paula jetty and lost the scent. I didn’t have money to even give the police who’re turned up so promptly…Tara immediately fell in love with the detection alsation dogs and told me my new Jocky underwear she bought were stolen…
The robbers had crossed to Vasco in the ferry with then operated between Dona Paula jetty and Vasco. First and foremost a media man I told Tara to go sit down at the computer and write the report of a robbery in our newly married couple’s life. The story appeared the next morning in the OHeraldo of which I was still the editor in 2002.
An unfortunate consequence of the robbery was the Tara’s mother refused to give her the rest of her share of jewelry she had put aside in bank locker. Her mother must have decided her daughter couldn’t look after anything. Tara was of course comfortable wearing all her collection of precious stone jewelry she picked up from her many mountain trips up north India, lots of costume jewelry. Later I bought her a gold chain and earrings which she rarely wears now or even the mangalsutra. It’s not important, she says, these are just superficial trappings.
We moved home several times. Tara and I completed 24 years of togetherness on February 10, 2025. If still alive we celebrate a silver marriage next February 10, 2026. It’s been a smooth ride accept for the last two to three years when I have been crippled by TB of the spine and handicapped in some ways. This Valentine’s Day I would like to say marriage is about cherishing one another in good times and bad times, be it good health or even chronic ill sickness which I have endured for the better part of my life in Bombay and Goa and particularly in the last two years.