Growing Up Karanth by K Ullas Karanth & Malavika Kapur & Kshama Rau

Author:K Ullas Karanth & Malavika Kapur & Kshama Rau [Karanth, K Ullas & Kapur, Malavika & Rau, Kshama]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-10T18:30:00+00:00

Tata and my own family

I first met Prathibha Shetty in 1972 when we were both twenty-four. She worked as a speech pathologist at NIMHANS, Bangalore and was a friend of Malakka and her husband, Ravi Kapur.

She was a pretty, cheerful girl. She was a brilliant student who topped the university exams, and later became an accomplished professional: a beauty with brains. Curiously, we had both been educated in Mangalore, living within two kilometres of each other’s homes. Her cousin Mohandas Shetty was a good friend, a pigeon lover like me. I had even visited their sprawling 300-year-old Kodialguthu house. But we had never met.

Soon we became good friends and then fell in love. By 1973 we had decided to get married. Tata and Amma both knew Prathibha’s mother Kausalia from their Besant School days. My parents were both fine with the idea of this alliance. So was Prathibha’s father, Kaup Sarvotham Shetty, a well-known lawyer in Mangalore. He was a socialist labour lawyer in Madras in the 1950s. Shetty was one of the young members of the Radical Humanist Party that the revolutionary Manvendra Nath Roy founded after being ejected from the communist movement by Joseph Stalin. Other young ‘Royists’ with Shetty were V.M. Tarkunde, who later became a Supreme Court judge, and S.R. Bommai, who later became chief minister of Karnataka.

However, Prathibha’s mother was unhappy about our alliance for the same reason that Amma’s maternal uncle was unhappy when she married Tata thirty-eight years earlier. Kausalia Shetty was worried that she would lose face in her community, given the high status the Kodialguthu clan enjoyed.

While I was frustrated and upset with her resistance, Prathibha, the patient counsellor, cajoled her mother for a full year and wore her down until she agreed. Unlike me, Tata was sympathetic to the agony Prathibha’s mother was going through. Amma, by then, was fully preoccupied with her own illnesses to care about all this.

Finally, when Kausalia Shetty agreed to our marriage, I felt happy and was ready for a quick civil ceremony or even a traditional Bunt wedding that entirely avoided Brahmin priests and Sanskrit mantras. However, my father-in-law sprang a surprise, perhaps to please the wider Karanth clan. He quietly organised a full-blown Brahmin style wedding. It was to be solemnised by a priest, with long hours of chanting of slokas before a sacred fire that belched much smoke. Desperate to get it over with, we all agreed.

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