“A life presumed lost”

In the issue dedicated to Mehera Jussawalla and her birth centenary, Adil, her first born and a talented writer has assisted readers to comprehend his mother by mixing candidness about various aspects of her life with sensitivity and even deference ("A life presumed lost,” Parsiana, April 21, 2012).
Aunty Mehera, as I always addressed and referred to her was the finest human being I have ever met. Her gentleness, warmth, universal friendship, giving nature, total identification with the suffering of man and beast and the absence of even an ounce of artificiality indicated that she was highly evolved and seemed to have a greater affinity with higher worlds than with a human setting.
I was privileged to know her because Firdausi, her younger son and a contemporary actor, was my childhood and life-long friend who studied at the same school. Not surprisingly, she married a pure and caring gentleman who seemed a messenger sent into the world to discover, apply and propagate the laws of health by means of vegetarianism, teetotalism and drugless healing. My mother, who had known Aunty during their adolescence in Poona, believed that Aunty Mehera and Uncle Jehangir formed an ideal couple and the foursome a quietly gifted family.
Many acts of Aunty Mehera’s kindness come to mind. When as a nine-year-old, I was traveling in the Poona Express from Poona to Bombay and another passenger claimed my seat, Aunty emerged from her compartment and took charge of me for the remainder of the journey. Whenever we visited her apartment, the sort of food and drink which reflected her creativity was made available in abundance.

Mehera Jussawalla: highly evolved

I was impressed that when she felt threatened by a dreaded disease, she turned to Christian Science rather than surrender to the knife-wielders. She always encouraged me to pray.
In familial matters, she laid emphasis on harmony. Adil mentioned that Aunty Mehera’s respect for her family’s wishes deterred her from encouraging the advances of a Sindhi boy from Santiniketan. When Adil married a French lady who had a child from a previous marriage, she merely told her daughter-in-law-to-be that if the latter treated her son as a prince, she’d treat her as a princess. In the India of the early 1970s, Aunty was almost avant garde when she was supportive of Firdausi’s invitation to his English girlfriend to reside in her flat.
It was always important to me that I should never hurt this beautiful, artistic and sensitive lady. Consequently, when she mentioned that her husband did not possess a single friend, I never told her that the gentleman would have had a greater understanding of humanity if he had taken time off to visit the countryside with Aunty Mehera, play bridge or golf and enjoy meals with others while sticking to his preferred dietary regimen. Or perhaps, could he too have transcended the human sphere?
KAIKHUSHRU LAM