BENGALURU: The date and year of my birth is lost in the labyrinth of time. In the Thirties of the last century, when I was born, registering a birth was not a customary practice and parents were often vague about the dates of their children’s births. For official purposes, of course, the date entered in the school certificate was considered final. My eldest brother,Tuntun Bhaiya, who had taken me to school for admission in 1944, had entered it as 6 November 1937.
My real age may well have been slightly higher (nobody seemed to remember by how much) but it was quite normal in those days to declare a child’s age as less than what it really was. Family planning was unheard of and the birth of a child was considered purely as the will of God. Child mortality was rampant, so it was not unusual for couples to have many children. My parents were blessed with eleven children—seven sons and four daughters. Fortunately, since all of us survived, we were a large family. I was the lucky ninth child (‘lucky’ because the number is supposed to be auspicious in Hindu astrology), born after six brothers and two sisters, and followed by two younger sisters. I am grateful my parents did not practice family planning, otherwise I never would have seen the light of day.
As the ninth-born, I believe my birth was an unremarkable event, prompting neither celebration nor exhilaration. In fact, I was probably an ‘extra’ my family could have done without.My parents called me Mukund – one of the names for Lord Vishnu – a perfectly decent name that could easily have been my official moniker. However, since my father liked to name his sons after famous warriors, he decided to give my name as Yashwant Sinha in the school register, after the famed Rajput warrior Jaswant Singh. It seems we did not have a fixed family name. My grandfather was Gopal Narayan, while my father adopted Saran as his family name.
My elder brothers decided to adopt the surname ‘Sinha’ and I followed suit. Since then Sinha has become our family name. It was also quite common to have both a pet name and a formal one. My brothers were Tuntun (Ram Pratap Sinha), Mutun (Bijay Narain Sinha), Lutur (Amar Sinha), Geeta (Samar Sinha), Meena (Ajit Sinha), and Govind (Ranjit Sinha). My eldest sister Prema was called Babuni. The other three mercifully had only one name each, Madhuri, Saroj and Manju. For me, Yashwant, meaning the ‘one who has achieved glory’, seemed to have been good enough.
My early childhood was largely uneventful, though history was being made in India and around the world. The latter was caught in the throes of the Second World War – and the country was busy with its struggle for freedom. With no school to attend and no homework to struggle with until I turned seven, I didn’t have a care in the world. I spent most of my days playing on the streets outside, taking up challenging games and getting into what adults would term mischief.
Often, these activities included dangerous pranks and stunts like balancing with a leg each on the two parallel walls behind our house. There was always the risk of falling between the two and getting hurt, which I often did, followed by stern admonitions. The scars on my chin are not just a reminder of those carefree days but also badges of honour from repeating the mischief again and again, till I learnt to balance myself.
Other escapades included hitching a ride on the footboard of a horse-drawn phaeton, which was at the back of the carriage, hidden from the driver’s view. There were quite a few of them hose days and the trick was to be quick enough to evade the reach of the driver’s long whip and scurry away to safety, with only a tongue lashing to follow.This habit of taking calculated risks survives till date.
Excerpted from Relentless by Yashwant Sinha,with permission from Bloomsbury India