Chinmayee Manjunath

When I was six, we lived in Madras for a year. In a lovely rambling bungalow in Besant Nagar, not far from Eliot’s Beach. This was in 1986 and Madras was a sleepy city. My father travelled a lot and my mother and I were mostly by ourselves in that large home.

The school I attended was not far from home. We had a routine, my mother and I – she walked me to and from school every day. Once or twice a week, I had music lessons. The evenings I did not, we went to the beach. I took my plastic bucket, filled with shovels and rakes to make sand castles with. One evening, the tide shifted suddenly and we were carried quite far into the sea and thrown back out. I still remember walking back home, dripping wet, very shaken but giggling at how ridiculous we looked – a little girl in a cotton dress and a young woman in a saree rushing past staring eyes to get home to a hot shower.

Once a month, my parents would go to the salons at the Taj Coromandel to get their haircuts. I would tag along, a book in hand and read on the sofa as my mother got her hair done in the women’s side of the salon. If my father finished early – he usually did – he would call me outside and take me for a walk by the pool or around the gardens. And the outing always ended with a slice of strawberry cream cake at the coffee shop. It was such a treat – a sponge cake, layered with strawberry-flavoured cream and slices of fruit, and crowned with lavish pink frosting.

It’s almost funny how certain childhood tastes stay with us. A slice of strawberry cake can send me back to that year. I loved our house. The trips to the beach. But I never fit in at school. And halfway through term, I fell violently ill with a ruptured appendix, which needed emergency surgery. For two months, I was home. Reading. Longing to go back to the beach. Playing with our neighbour’s Lab puppies – there were eight black balls of velvet, and a proud, cheerful mama dog to watch over them.

It was an odd year in a city that never let us in. My mother, who was in her mid-30s, felt out of place but soldiered on, as always, learning broken Tamil, finding a community of women who she did volunteer work with whenever she had time to spare, managing that big old house and tending to me. I marvel now at her tenacity and resilience – it was not an easy city to be alone with a young girl in and these were pre-Google times. She’s a trouper.

My parents threw me a lavish – by the standards of that time – birthday party when I recovered. There was a Mickey Mouse-shaped cake from the Taj, with jam as frosting. My mother made butter-and-jam sandwiches on tutti-frutti bread. They brought in savouries from Grand Sweets. I was dressed in a lavender dress with a black sailor collar. They gifted me a lavender-coloured cameo brooch to wear. It was such a special evening for me. We left Madras for Hyderabad at the end of the year, back to a city that had always embraced us. That brooch was lost in the move, sadly.

My mother is fond of looking at old photographs and sometimes, I join her. Each time we find pictures of that birthday party, I marvel at how the brooch – which my father had brought back from Nepal – sealed my love for cameo. Years later, a family friend gifted me a cameo brooch and earrings set from London, which I still treasure.

And on my 31st birthday, nine months after my father died, I was alone in Italy on a work trip. I hadn’t wanted to go but was talked into it and am glad I was because it was cathartic and just what I needed. I spent my birthday evening – my first ever birthday without my father – at the famous St Anthony’s Church in Padua. Listening to the worship of the patron saint of lost things. I could not get back the parent I had lost but I did pray for strength and grace. That weekend, I took the train from Padua to Venice, to spend the day. As I walked up and down the streets, I spotted a vintage cameo ring in an old shop. Beautifully crafted and set in scalloped silver. I bought it as a souvenir and a talisman. It’s now become the most precious piece of jewellery I own.