So out of those two stories came a story of my own. It would refuse the colonial past, and talk about freedom. It wouldn’t be a story that the British gave us permission to tell. My father’s joke, a long time after even he had stopped telling it, made me think: “What if there wasn’t an eight-week gap? What if somebody was born at the exact same moment as his country? What sort of story might that be?”Īnd my Breach Candy moment answered that question. And one of the things I’ve learned is that stories give birth to other stories. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of my life swimming in stories (and telling a few, too). What burst out of me then was perhaps my first ever political statement. As it happened, I had a white school friend, and he invited me to go to the club for a swim. Finally it gave an inch: it said that if a white member wished to bring in a brown guest, that brown person would be admitted. This didn’t go down well in newly independent India but the club was resistant to change. I could look down into it from my bedroom window. And here’s a true story: at the bottom of the hill where we lived, in the Breach Candy neighborhood of Bombay (now Mumbai), there was a private swimming club.
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