Neighborhood Folks
Roma
Roma’s Story
I met Roma in a writing workshop in the summer of 2008 at the New School. She was in New York for several months after the birth of her first grandchild, Malika. Her daughter and son both live here with their spouses and have high profile jobs in investment firms.
Roma is from a military family in Calcutta. Her father was an army lieutenant, and her mother worked as a volunteer, delivering bad news of loved ones deaths to families during the 1971 Indo-Paki war that separated Pakistan from Bangladesh.
After her extensive education in Christian boarding schools, she went on to work as a radio announcer for India Public radio. She is now retired after a thirty-year career as speech writer for government officials in India.
Roma hungered for education as a child. One of her first memories is of trying to run off to a local school at the age of three. She managed to escape her mother’s eye, and the nuns at the school brought her back home, saying she was too young. Little Roma pestered her mom to let her go to school, and finally the exasperated woman brought her there and asked if her child proved herself with a reading and writing test, would they place her in what was the youngest group for five-year olds. She passed easily and was placed as the youngest child in the school.
From then on, Roma’s education history was a mixed bag of exceptional scholarship, athleticism, and giddy mischief. She loved to “chatter,” in class, as she told me, and that often got her into trouble with the strict authority figures in charge at the various schools she attended. Once they punished her by locking her into an empty classroom. The crafty Roma figured out how to get onto the roof of the building, and watched with glee as the frantic nuns scoured the grounds looking for her. She slept under the stars on the roof that night and revealed herself the next morning. The principal called her parents and told them to pick her up; that despite her high grades and leadership in team sports, she was too much trouble to deal with.
As a young woman, during the prime years of Gandhi’s popularity, other international trends traveled to India; the Elvis Presley craze caught on, along with pictures of the American star in Photoplay magazine. The Twist and Cha Cha found its way into Indian teenage circles, creating a stir. Roma gets nostalgic remembering a song “I’ve Got a Funny Feeling I’m Falling in Love with You,” while she studied Economics in her father’s back-room den.
Roma was married to her husband who managed a British tea plantation, and they were able to travel the world, and lived in Africa for ten years as well. She divides her time visiting her children and granddaughter in New York, and back home in India. She writes children’s’ stories and currently has sold two of her works to India PBS for a children’s serial show.