Author Malavika Karlekar has recently edited the memoirs of her mother Monica Gupta and published it as Of Colonial Bungalows and Piano Lessons — An Indian Woman’s Memoirs. It documents the journey of her mother, starting from the early 1900s, and shares major points from her life, like when eight-year-old Monica had her first piano lesson.

At a recent talk organized by the publishing house, Sampark, Malavika Karlekar, author and editor of the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, spoke about her mother’s life at length. Monica, the only daughter of civil servant Jnanendra Nath Gupta and his wife Sarala Dutt, got her piano lessons from an Englishwoman.  “It was from those first lessons that her love for the instrument grew,” said Malavika.

When Monica got her first piano, “a Rachals upright piano, an instrument with a deep mellow tone and it became very precious to me”, her mother insisted on keeping it in the drawing room as a status symbol. She wanted to show off that along with playing tennis and being able to ride, her daughter also knew how to play the piano.

Malavika shared that though she had never seen her mother play the piano, Monica’s piano teacher, Mother Germaine, had believed that she was a really talented pianist as she had been chosen to record a piece in her school.

“Mother Germaine, was very anxious that I should proceed to England and try to join the Royal Academy of Music for further tuition in playing the piano,” wrote Monica in her memoir. Monsieur Sandré — the founder of the Calcutta School of Music, also advised Monica to go abroad for further training but her father, saying that he would think about it, never talked about it again.

While all this happened with a rather young Monica, the words were penned when she was an adult, a married woman, and it still carries the resentment held by a child against their parents.

H/T: The Telegraph