We spent the day seeing around St. Petersburg, the cultural headquarters
of Russia. The place is replete with historical monuments. As the
summer progresses, the sunlight’s duration slowly increases from a
miserly six hours during bitter winters to 19 in peak summer.
I was born in Bhubaneswar, the capital city of Odisha, although my parents were
from Lahore. I speak Odiya fluently, but when we were kids, we spoke Hindi at
home. I have grown up in Odisha, and because of the partition, Lahore is out-of-bounds for us. For all intents and purposes, I am an Odia now.
We continued sightseeing. During the 2nd World War, Hitler’s Army
besieged St. Petersburg (then Leningrad). The senseless murder of
civilians and wholesale destructions of ancient cities by marauding
armies is a constant worldwide.
I have heard from my parents about the Lahore of pre-1947. That’s from
where my Hindu grandparents and lacs like them relocated to save their skin
during the bloody days of partition. In a way, my grandfather was a part of
the War. He was in the Indian Military Accounts Services and retired as
Dy. CAG. My father was born in Lahore in 1931, and he pushed me to do
chartered accountancy.
My dad’s meandering journeys, starting with partition, continued. After
his entrepreneurial venture failed, he joined an Asbestos Corrugated Sheet
manufacturer, got posted in Bhubaneswar, and decided he would spend the
rest of his life there. For his children’s studies, he sacrificed his promotions by
shunning transfers and retired as head of marketing, Odisha.
