This controversial but acclaimed memoir offers an unflinchingly honest account of his parents’ private lives, his childhood, and the raw detailing of how their decisions and indecisions shaped their familial bonds. The author doesn’t shy away from telling the complicated truth, even if it doesn’t represent all the facts. He presents his best recollection of a life lived with domineering public personalities and their fallout in their professional and private lives.
He writes about his father, the prolific and well-known Minoo Masani, as well as his mother, the headstrong and graceful Shakuntala Masani, in greater detail while adding nuances about their worlds-apart parents, childhoods, upbringings, education, social lives, and thought processes. While Minoo Masani was born and brought up in Mumbai (then Bombay under the British Raj), Shakuntala grew up in a bustling trading town called Kanpur in the northern part of India.
Minoo Masani hails from the Parsi community, which has contributed to Mumbai’s growth story from cultural, educational, and financial perspectives. Although it’s a minority community, it holds a significant presence across Mumbai through its economic and philanthropic might. He belongs to the illustrious industrial family, Wadia, from his maternal side, although his father rose from a humble background. However, his parents put emphasis on austerity, simple living, and gaining strength through educational progress. This became the bedrock of Minoo and his siblings’ existence on which they built their educational and later vocational careers.
Born into the house of Sir Jwala Prasad Srivastava, Shakuntala, on the other hand, was brought up with vastly different economic and social values. Although JP Srivastava insisted on educating his daughters like his sons, Shakuntala decided to forgo education and rebel against her father. That decision became a turning point in her life from which she could never return. Since she was raised in a feudal class with significant wealth and status, living independently was not easy. So, it looks like she fell in love with the Minoo in a classic case of an affair on a rebound.
For Shakuntala, her union with Minoo Masani provided the headstrong, ill-conceived rebellion that she planned against her parent’s social regulations and financial dominion. On the other hand, this union offered Minoo the much coveted social and public acceptance by having a cultured, beautiful, and graceful woman by his side. In a way, they complemented each other till they could fulfill their corresponding roles in each other’s lives. So, it seems their marriage was going more or less amicable till the early years of their son’s life.
As expected, Minoo Masani managed to carve his niche in newly independent India’s increasingly volatile and polarizing political space. However, his third wife, Shakuntala, soon got bored of playing the role of the perfect hostess and being part of the affluent social set. Although his life’s focus and priorities were very much set, she was unclear about what she wanted from life. Their significant age gap and her catching up to be a political wife also played a big role in the disintegration of their relationship, in addition to romantic flings on both sides.
As she rebelled against her father, Shakuntala repeated a similar stunt against her husband. Not only did it jeopardize his political future for an indefinite time, but it also uprooted the very foundation of their marriage. The following two decades proved to be tumultuous in the country’s history and their personal lives. Once Zareer moves out to pursue higher studies and his career in England, the last remaining vestiges of his parents’ marriage also deteriorate beyond repair.
Although Zareer Masani comes across as an unapologetically honest writer narrating the tales of his birth country, its shifting political ideologies, and social fabric while examining his parents’ marriage from a microscopic view, he tries to lean much to his mother’s side once the political ideologies differences creep in his family. Then, what he writes about his well-known father becomes a one-sided view of a mother’s favored and cherished son owing to his personal and political beliefs. This stance remains more or less till the very end of his parent’s lives, where he seems to redeem himself by mellowing towards his father and becoming a reluctant sole caretaker for his mother.
We readers very rarely come across such an honest portrayal of a home divided by social, behavioral, and political ideologies. Therefore, this book becomes an absolute must-read for seekers of a highly recommended memoir.