The Way They Were

There is something strangely appropriate about Anjolie Ela Menon’s painting which is featured on the cover of Mrs. Baig’s book. A female, oddly nun-like, with a portrait on her lap, and another on a locket, stands framed in a window, seeing through shut eyes. Mrs. Baig is, of course, far less detached in her observa¬tions on the people she has known but she is at a secluded distance when she writes. That perhaps saves this book from becoming utterly frivolous, as also her wise decision to write at length only of those among her large circle of friends and acquaintances whose shared traits were not necessarily of intellect or spectacular distinction, though these are also to be found, but of breadth of vision, courage and compassion. Mrs. Baig switches back and forth in time to great effect and her era is not temporal, but mental, taking in figures as far apart in time as Sarojini Naidu and Bunker Roy. Her portraits are mainly of people who shone in the years just before Independence and the golden decade that followed, the years when Jawaharlal Nehru symbolized India’s confidence in herself.