Several months ago I had spoken to Suresh Oza on the phone. I wanted to tell him that we were most likely to visit India at the beginning of 2014. I called him in January to tell him that we were visiting Gujarat in February and March. I was reaching Bhavnagar in mid-February to spend a fortnight with my last remaining Samaldas College friends. At the end of February I was going to Ahmedabad. I made a number of phone calls without getting any response from him. Normally I would have written to him but Royal Mail stopped selling airmail letters and this weakened my willingness to use envelopes for overseas posting. It is likely that I had checked his number with Girishbhai but there was no word from Suresh. We had a very hectic time in Ahmedabad. My phone calls to Suresh did not bring forth any response. It is only now after I had a message from Girishbhai, I learned that he died in January and my search for him in early March, sadly, would not have brought us together. I feel deeply sad that I did not personally go to his Ambavadi residence where I would have been told by his neighbours that he was no longer alive.
Suresh was not a part of my Samaldas College crowd and we ought to have met either through Kirit Bhatt and or Prafull Dave or Shailesh Dave. He lived in Tankshal Sheri in this winding street from Vora Bazar. I still remember his house although I did not visit it when I was in Bhavnagar for a fortnight in February this year as he himself was of course no longer living there. It is most likely that we came close to each other as I was interested in both Gujarati and English writing. It is most probable that I may have started reading Earl Stanely Gardner and Aghata Christie detective books from the Barton Library and from my friend Jagdish’s father Chabilbhai. Chabilbhai had a collection of books in English and subscribed to Time and Life magazines which we were allowed to borrow for reading. I often met Suresh at his Tankshal Sheri house and often walked around together to Gandhi Smriti and beyond and shared conversation on various topics. Memory of his Tankshal Sheri house is now vague but I remember going with him up the stairs and sitting down and chatting. Although his wife might have been there, I do not recall seeing her in a way so that I could have remembered her face.
Suresh’s literary and artistic abilities were evident from the start. He was proud to show me his beautiful pencil sketches and paintings which had reminded me of Kanu Desai’s work. I also recall that he was able to publish his stories. It is unfortunate that I remember no details worth mentioning except to confirm that he continued writing and painting. I am sure he was in contact with Mahendra Meghani’s Milap Karyalaya on High Court Road located next door to a room that was my residence and ‘home’ for four years. I remember that some of his sketches had appeared in Milap magazine.
I do remember my visit to his house when my Bhavnagar stay came to end in 1959. We were sitting down for a final chat before I left Bhavnagar. I remember he gave me a small painting as a parting gift. Having been hand to mouth during my Bhavnagar time (supported by a shopkeeper father whose shop had gone down hill in later part of his life), all I had was an English Language Dictionary which I gave him.
On my return to Uganda, I was entering a different phase of my life. I moved to Kampala and accepted a teaching job in a private school that was run by an Ismaili gentleman for African children. I continued my education and did a Diploma in Teaching at Makerere University in Kampala. A Gujarati social anthropologist Rashmi Desai (now Melbourne Australia) encouraged me to go for an MA in Anthropology in Sociology Department at Makerere University. An academic Noel King in Theology and Religioius Studies then asked me to join him at University of California in Santa Cruz. I spent little more than two years doing undergraduate tutorials and attending some sociology and anthropology courses at UC Berkeley. The only Bhavnagar contact I had was with the artist Prafull Dave and Mahendra Shah. Both of them were my close and intimate friends. I had no contact with Suresh although I always remembered him when I looked at the painting that he had given to me. I left California in 1970 to join School of Oriental and African Studies Anthropology and then joined University of Bristol in 1972 as a lecturer. Apart from my contact with Prafull Dave in London, I kept in touch with Mahendra Shah (Shah Bookshop on High Court Road, next to the main Post Office). Contact with Suresh was to come to life when I visited India in 1981. The purpose of this visit was to visit Swaminarayan locations in Gujarat and to visit Bhavnagar and Palitana. Once I was in Bhavnagar, I went to Tankshal Sheri to find the house locked. A neighbour informed me that Suresh had moved to live in Ahmedabad and came to Bhavnagar now and then. What I did was to write a short letter to him giving him details of my Bristol address and telephone number and dropped it inside the house. In time I received a letter from him as he was very pleased to learn where I was and we began to exchange letters.
After my retirement in 2004 I and Jyoti decided to visit our Gujarat friends and look up mates in Chennai and travel through South India. I had already informed Suresh that we were going to be Ahmedabad. He came to meet us at our hotel and we spent some very pleasant and delightful time together. He wanted to offer us a lunch at Sasuji Gujarati restaurant. We spent a pleasant and enjoyable time there. We also went to visit him at his Sainath Apartments in Ahmedabad. We had a pleasant conversation with some refreshments. He showed us his drawings and sketches and promised to send me copies of his writing.
He had already sent me a copy of his short story collection Sanket which he had published himself with the financial assistance from Gujarat Sahitya Academy and had dedicated to his brother Shree Divyakant Oza. In 1994, Parth Prakashan Ahmedabad published his second collection titled Irsha. He airmailed me a copy that bears his signature and dated 14th January 2003. I was grateful for the effort that he had made to keep me aware of his writing. He was a keen observer of life of ordinary people. His stories contained characters and people who were drawn from what he had seen and observed around him. I plan to read these stories again and offer a comment on what they convey about Suresh’s view of Gujarati social life as it unfolded around him.
I will remember Suresh as a handsome looking youthful person. He was sensitive and understanding and I valued his friendship in Bhavnagar. I will recall our walks and the time that we spent together talking about writing and works of writers like Somerset Maugham and his great observations of how life unfolded for his human characters and problematic nature of human bondage. I feel sad that I did not really have a proper opportunity to spend an extended period of time with Suresh and share some of his personal worries and sufferings that he may have incurred. I never met anyone in his family and may have had only a fleeting glimpse of face of his wife. My Shamaldas college friend Mahendra Shah reminds me that we used to call him Samajdar Suresh as we regarded him as a person with profound understanding of life. I will remember him for a long time to come and promise to re-read his books to see what do his stories tell us about him. Needless to add that I and Jyoti offer a prayer for eternal peacefulness of his soul and send our condolences to all who knew him during the course of his life.
Bristol, 12 June 2014 [Photos by Rohit Barot]
e.mail : rohitbarot@gmail.com
