Growing up in the company of nubile women by Ahmed Bunglowala For a small town guy, St. Xavier’s was a testing place for the first six months. The young men and women—strutting their designer clothes and attitude in the gargoyle-festooned quadrangle — made me very self-conscious of the two pairs of shirt and trouser my mother had put together from her meagre earnings as a part-time seamstress. The Xavier’s quadrangle, as it turned out, was the best ‘classroom’ in the college. Here you could observe the foibles and frailties of human nature on glorious display! Inside the classrooms, we had a widely varying quality of faculty—the good, the mediocre and the egotistical. Apart from the quadrangle, the college canteen became, for me, the next best growing-up experience. It was here that I first met Edwina and Vijaya (my future wife) over some excellent beef chilly fry that the place used to dish out in those days. All the waiters were Goan — Dominic, Savio or Peter — living within walking distance in Dhobi Talao, known, then, as the Little Goa of Bombay; now being rapidly gentrified into a mini Connaught Place. I was introduced to the two young women by a mutual acquaintance whose name I can’t remember. Edwina was bluff and friendly as usual but Vijaya was plainly sceptical of a small-town johnnie plying his charms in the college canteen. Anyway, we got to know one another better as the second semester waned. By the beginning of the second year, I became a permanent fixture around Edwina and Vijaya. They didn’t seem to mind my innocuous presence; at times I was a reassuring male figure at the bus stop waiting with them to board their busses — Edwina to Colaba, Vijaya to distant Chembur (and I to Nagpada, last).
Read full text here: https://selma-carvalho.squarespace.com/nonfiction-1/2018/3/20/short-memoir-growing-up-in-the-company-of-nubile-women Best wishes, selma
