Continuing from Getting closer and The courtship
The Marriage
The Pragati Nagar Community Hall was selected as the venue for the marriage ceremony. A nearby house was arranged for the stay of stay of the immediate relatives from Susmita’s side. The guests from our side who were to attend the marriage from out of Ahemdabad were partly accommodated in our home and partly at another nearby house. All the guests belonging to both sides had started arriving a day before. Since the marriage function was in the first half the day, the guests from outside went back by the night of the marriage day.
Maheshbhai had gone to collect the Registrar of Marriages from his office. They reached the venue of the marriage function by around 11 AM. Shortly, thereafter, the marriage ceremony – the oath-taking by I and Susmita, followed by authenticating the marriage by signing the marriage register and validation by two witnesses from each side – was completed.
From our side, Maheshbhai and Gorakaka (my uncle, Janardanbhai Pranlal Vaishnav) were the witnesses.
Divyabhash and Bhujangibhai Vaidya (Susmita’s maternal uncle) were the witnesses from Susmita’ side.
The menu for the lunch served after the marriage was rather simple – Dudhi Halwa, Motichur Laddu, two vegetables, two farsans, dal and rice.
I had prevailed upon to keep marriage ceremony limited to this level by not inviting anyone form my office staff.
From left:
Front row: Harshika, Divyanginibhai(with Arman), Gayatri, Mota Amma, Deviben (with Sandip in the front)
Second row: Bharati, Susmita, I Pratibhabhai (With Bhargavi), Ben, Gorikaki
Third row: Nimesh, Darshan, Sanjay (partly seen) Nareshbhai
Back row: Kunjalataben, Gorakaka, Maheshbhai, Divyakumarbhai
From left: Karnika, Kunjalataben, Susmita, Ben, I, Maheshbhai, Divyabhash
Sanjay (in the back)
The Married Life
The first week
We spent our post-marriage first week at Mumbai.
On the third day of the marriage, we left for Mumbai, along with Kunjalataben, Divyabhash and Karnika. Around midnight, some passengers from our sleeper coach loudly announced that Mrs. Indira Gandhi had lost the 1977 elections to the Lok Sabha from the Rae Bareilly seat.
The day after we reached Mumbai, a small dinner reception was arranged on the terrace of Pearl Palace (the home that Divyabhash had purchased before shifting to Zaire and disposed off after a couple of years). A close group of Kunjalataben’s relatives and acquaintances at Mumbai were invited for the function.
Susmita utilized our stay at Mumbai to purchase some carpets and curtain cloth for the divider between drawing room and the dining room, for decorating our home at Pragati Nagar.
1977 to 1979
Our first task after settling down at Ahmedabad, was to find a meaningful occupation for Susmita, commensurate with her education, knowledge and strong inclination for mathematics. Our efforts did not materialize in success. As I look back, it seems so obvious that our efforts were not adequate or systematic or concerted enough. Later on, she did dabble with offering tuitions to some children form the neighbourhood. But my rather unbalanced work life balance, put more than extra burden on Susmita’s domestic life, ultimately resulting in these efforts into not working out to any meaningful professional occupation for her.
Our beginning of enjoying our life together started with my experiments with photography, listening to collection of the records, and visiting book exhibitions in Ahmedabad whenever held
My office routine at GST was supposed to have only half working Saturday. We started utilizing that window for going to watch English movies for a 4.30 PM show at Advance theatre, which also happened to be very near to GST office, located at Bank of India Building, Bhadra. Here too, I soon started getting late to reach for the show. For a few months, I could barely manage to reach the cinema hall just before the screening of the movie would commence. Then a couple of times, I could not even manage that. As a result, that activity too got short shrift, signalling beginning of skewing of my work life balance.
Our first trip away from Ahmedabad commenced with a gaffe. We had planned a three-night trip to Saputara (a hill station in South Gujarat) sometime in end -77 or early-78. We boarded an early morning bus from Gita Mandir – the Gujarat State Transport central bus station in Ahmedabad. As I handed over our seat reservation tickets to the conductor, he summarily asked us to get down form the bus. We indeed argued with him for some time! He then relented and showed me the ticket. It was an old ticket of my travel to Rajkot! We were now taken aback and apologised and requested him to issue fresh tickets. Just then, Susmita remembered something and fished out the ticket from her purse! Our rest of the journey to Saputara went unhindered, but I was not able to look in the direction of the conductor for the whole journey!
It was sometime in mid-1978 or so that Maheshbhai’s services were transferred to Dantiwada, the HQ being developed for the then Gujarat Agriculture University. We paid several two- or three-day visits to Dantiwada during Maheshbhai’s stay there. In one such trip, we had to face extremely heavy downpour as we landed at Palnapur, on way to Dantiwada, being stranded for almost an hour or two on the highway in the lashing rains. When we ultimately reached home, we heard the news on the radio that Morbi, the hometown of Susmita’s maternal uncle, Pranlalbhai H Vaidya, was devastated by a devastating flash flood because of the collapse of the earthen dam on the river Machchu.
Susmita planned her maiden, and the only, trip abroad in beginning of third quarter of 1979. She was to visit Kinshasha, Zaire to stay with Divyabhash family there. After the hassles of getting several vaccinations done, when finally, Susmita and I reached Bombay airport, while taking a stopover say with Harshavadabbhai and Surabhi for Susmita’s travel to Nairobi. It was raining so heavily that her check-in bag was completely drenched. When she opened it on arrival at Nairobi, several of her sarees were stained because of seepage of rainwater in the bag!
I, along with Sanjay, gamely tried our hand with cooking our own food. Once Sanjay put the pot of milk on the gas for heating and then forgot about it all. The pot remained unattended on the burner flame so long that all the milk in the pot was charred to coal. The stink in the house was so overwhelming that even after consuming a couple of packets of incense sticks, for next two three days our entire neighbourhood had hard time dealing with stink. In another instance, when Maheshbhai was also with us during his trips from Dantiwada, we had added soda instead of salt during the cooking of okra subji! Taking pity on our such (mis)adventures, Madhuben (wife of our floor neighbour Bachubhai Gohil at # 9/52, Pragatinagar) would cook lentils and rotis for us and trained us for cooking simple subjis. When Susmita returned form the Kinshasha trip, we proudly served her okra vegetable cooked by us, along with other dishes prepared by Madhuben.
When Susmita’s plan to visit Kinshasha was being finalised, I was getting inclined to resign my services from GST. Finally, I had put in my papers in June 1979 and was to leave GST by end of September 1979, just after Susmita returned from Kinshasha. Before I took up active implementation of our entrepreneurial project, Arish Equipment, I worked for another projects. It was here that we tried to shape Susmita’s professional career in the field of cost accountancy. However, before it could come out of the initial moves and settle down to a meaningful effort, I quit that stop-gap (mis)adventure and started working full time on green-field implementation of Arish Equipment. So, Susmita’s foray into the cost accountancy also was abandoned.
1979 – 2002
The two-three years of setting up of Arish Equipment were real hardship years for Susmita. Facing the uncertainty of unknown future, managing the household front with highly erratic and inadequate monthly cash flows, without letting the signs of doubts come on the surface was much tough ordeal than the risk I had undertaken to chart the course of our own (manufacturing) venture
The small trips being arranged by Ashwinbhai Palkiwala[1] or our visits to Dantwada or Rajkot (to visit Gorakaka family or Nimesh family), during 1979 to 1981, seemed to provide us the force to keep on hold our life on an even keel against these odds.
Today it may sound quite trite to say that I could ride through that phase only because of Susmita’s unflinching support.
It was only after the birth of Tadatmya (in 1981) that we had come out of the initial teething trying phase of putting up Arish Equipment from ICU support. However, by the time things became little comfortable, Maheshbhai passed away in December 1983.
Another factor that helped us to remain floating was very active and live company of the families of my three very close friends, Kusumakar (Dholakia), Mahesh (Mankad) and Samir (Dholakia). As each one of us married, their spouses – respectively, Jagruti, Harmila and Meena – and later their children – respectively, Khyati, Anang & Hirawa and Fenil – too remained closely bonded. We also enjoyed dine-outs in outdoor restaurants near Ahmedabad as well as dine-ins at any of the homes.
The first sign that our marriage was on sound economic and social tracks can be assigned to our trip to Kulu Manali (in 1987). We chos to join a conducted tour, the only one that we so did in all these years. On way to Ambala, near Dahod a few coaches of goods train had derailed, causing our train to get parked at a very small station, where only bananas were available, which too ran out of stock soon. The AC of the coach was also switched off after about half an hour. So, we passed around four hours of waiting time on a small bench on the platform. Our improvised dinner of samosa and masala parathas was served at Ajmer by around 11 PM. Even at that hour, I and Tadatmya duly consumed samosas, preserving the parathas for early breakfast next morning. Our train reached Ambala by one o’clock in the afternoon. At that hour, the cooks accompanying the tour cooked a quick lunch right on the footpath near railway station. All the fellow travellers of the tour too duly enjoyed the much on that very footpath.
Apart from the organized trips we did enjoy informal visits to Bhuj and Mumbai.
During one such our visit to Mumbai (my maternal cousin) Nimesh, his wife Pratibhabhi family too had been visiting Pratibhabhabhi’s brother Yogeshbhai. We had arranged a get together at Juhu beach during that visit.
As marriage of Akshay, here before referred to at The Courtship, helped us bring us closer during the courtship, other functions like marriages of Bharati (my maternal cousin sister) at Porbandar and Vibha (my other maternal cousin sister) at Gandhinagar, yagnopavit function of Darshan (my younger cousin brother), marriage function of Harshika (my younger cousin sister), were great help in providing much needed relief from our, mentally too demanding, routine of the then life.
Around 1989, we purchased our own first car, a white Premier Padmini. Susmita tried to refresh her driving skills for some time. In those years, Gorakaka family used to live in sector near Gandhinagar power station. Susmita did drive the car from our home at Pragati Nagar to Gorakaka’ home in Gandhinagar and back. She was felling quite confident to continue driving the car on Ahmedabad roads. But then gave up finally, being fed up with (the then) traffic pattern of Ahmedabad.
It was around that time that I was elected President of Vatva Industries Association. We hosted a gala dinner for around 50 to 70 people at a garden restaurant near what is now known junction of Sargam – Bodakdev road and Satya Road leading out to the CG Road.
Another very memorably happy function that we participated was in organising a Nagar Mandal get together at Pragati Nagar. The event was co-hosted by the then members of the Nagar community of Pragati Nagar.
Susmita had to bear the stress of my freak illness – caused by severe acidity – after we had wound up the process of sale of our ancestral house at Bhuj in 1992.
It was after that we started to search for a ‘bigger’ accommodation for ourselves. We ran our search through all possible locations in Ahmedabad. However, once when we were returning from a walk, we saw a house under construction near Sanskar Bharati Society (Ankur Road, Naranpura, Ahmedabad). Just a couple of more enquiries and one closer inspection at the location and we finalized the purchase of our own first home at 10, Meera Apartment. Six months of dedicated efforts to develop the interiors to our taste made the home ready to occupy.
As we shifted to this home, we had had the privilege of performing the well-laid housewarming ceremony. To all others in VAISHNAVs family, watching me dutifully performing the rituals was a double pleasure. The obvious was because of shifting to our own home. But even more pleasurable to them was seeing someone like me, who is normally not much inclined to rituals and traditions, sitting through the puja ceremony. So much so, that Gorakaka (my uncle, Janardanbhai Vaishnav) insisted that I put on a mandatory puja dress code, dhoti. He even helped me to put it on, with a constant care all-round the function, while secretly enjoying my obvious discomfort!
My colleagues at ‘Ratnamani’ took up the total logistics responsibility of shifting our household belongings from Pragati Nagar to Meera and even setting it up very well at Meera. They also planned and executed a traditional luncheon for around seventy-five guests.
Almost immediately thereafter, we had opportunity to organize the marriage function of Darshan (and Ami).
Though my work-life balance continued to remain skewed our personal life was now on an even track.
In 1998, Tadatmya went away to join the graduation study in Computer Science and Engineering at KRC, Surathkal. Physically that did some create avoid in our life, his steady progress there more than compensated whatever emotional loss we obviously felt. We have had occasions to enjoy his stay there by organising two vacation tours – to Mangalore- Udupi circuit and to Kochi -Thiruvananthapuram circuit at Kerala.
We also had to bear the trauma of 26th January 2001 earthquake. Once our house stopped moving like a pendulum, we all walked down the staircase and came out in the open street. By late afternoon, the arrangement was made for the stay of all residents of Meera in a ground floor house opposite Meera. We had put up a community stay for around a fortnight there. Tadatmya, who had come for a vacation from Surathkal, had to travel back from there too.
On 22nd September 2002, we lost Pratibhabhabhi for ever.
Towards the end of 2002, I was offered the position of Unit Head for Saw Pipes Ltd Plant at Nana Kapaya, Mundra (Kutch).
For me it was just a challenge of succeeding at a much higher professional level. But for Susmita, it was once again living through the period of mental uncertainty, coupled with physically setting the family in a new environment.
When I took leave to take up my midnight train to Gandhidham, I and Susmita would have liked so much that Susmita could have been able to come to drop me at the railway station. However, returning alone from the station at that late hour forbade us from doing so. Susmita had to remain content with bidding goodbye from the Derasar corner near Meera.
[1] Recalling the Memories of Ashwin Shantilal Palkiwala
To follow….
2003 to 2011
Ghulam Mohammed (1903 – 17 March 1968) was trained as dholak player, but the strength of his natural insight for rhythm ensured he was equally comfortable and proficient with folk percussion instruments like duff or matka.
Talat Mahmood (24 February 1924 – 9 May 1998) as a singer had a magical spell over the listeners in the 50s. The career of this velvet-voiced singer ran parallel to his other cotemporary singers like Mohammad Rafi, Mukesh, Manna Dey and Kishore Kumar. Talat Mahmood sang 747 songs in 12 Indian languages and starred in 13 films.
Jaidev – B: 3 August 1919 – D: 6 January 1987 – is respectfully regarded as poet’s music director. He would build his composition such that poetry would remain the foreground, while basing his compositions in classical or folk styles, If his music can be said to have lost the mass popularity touch, by mid-‘70s he had made a strong come back where his music unfailingly got class approval as well as liking from the discerning common listeners. The annals of Hindi film music history would record the years 1977 to 1980 as having Jaidev’s best score in the second innings. Emboldened by such an encouraging response, Jaidev could boldly experiment with new singers as well.
The world is too small? or Is it? 
