Among Merwan's childhood friends were a Muslim, Abdul S. Ghani (later known as Dr. Ghani ), Ghani's younger brother Abdur, Khodadad Shirzad Irani (nicknamed Khodu and later Sailor Mama ), Khodu's relative Bairam Jamshed Irani (nicknamed Baily ), Miya Khan, Palkhiwala and several others, most of whom were of Persian descent like himself. They comprised his neighborhood playmates. With them, Merwan delighted in flying kites, playing marbles, Hide-and-Seek, gilli-danda , and at night a game called Nighttime in the Moonlight.1 Baily recalls:
Merwan was an expert in playing marbles, and nobody could win against him. Merwan would often be seen engrossed in this game near his house. He would win all the marbles from all the boys in the vicinity. He would then either give them back equally to all the boys, donate them to the poor children, or sell them cheaply to other boys, and from the four to six paise [cents] he earned, he would buy some food items for himself as well as for his friends.
Likewise, Merwan was also an expert at kite flying. He would prepare the kite string by himself. He would order friends to pick up pieces of glass wherever they found them. Collecting the glass from them, he would take it home and crush it into powder, using a mortar and pestle used for grinding masala [spices]. Then he would strain this powder and add to it other ingredients (a kind of glue and other powders to give it color). He would mix all this, boil it, cool it and apply the solution to the string. He would spend almost the entire day in making this string himself. For a person of my nature, it felt very boring. But Merwan had a lot of enthusiasm in preparing his fighting kite, and he used to succeed in cutting his opponents' strings [the object of competitive kite flying]. At the end of a session of this game, it is customary for the winner to rewind the string on his spindle, but Merwan would break his string deliberately and let the kite fly away gracefully into the sky. He would observe its flight, enjoying the sight of the kite swaying here and there up in the sky — even though it meant, once again, Merwan would have to take another day to prepare a new kite string because of this gesture.
As far as I know, the game that Merwan most enjoyed was gilli-danda whether played in the narrow lane of his house, at school, the gymkhana or at Bhoot Maidan.2 Wherever he got a chance, he would start playing gilli-danda.
Footnotes
- 1.Gilli, a small wooden piece, is hit as far as possible by a danda, a wooden stick; it is played by teams trying to catch each other's hits.
- 2.A maidan is an open public space, like a commons. Bhoot means ghost, so at one time this area may have been thought to be haunted, perhaps because of some tragedy that had occurred there.