Light of Other Days (An Old and Rare Book)

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Saraswati Menon was born in Madras in May 1902 as the youngest daughter of Chettur Sankaran Nair. She attended school in Madras till the age of thirteen, when in 1915 Sankaran Nair was appointed Member of the Viceroy's Executive Council and the family moved to Delhi. Thereafter her education was confined to Sanskrit. In 1919, Sankaran Nair resigned in protest at the Jalianwala Bagh massacre, and for the next few years she was in Malabar. In 1923, she married Shri K.P.S. Menon I.C.S., and for a couple of years, shared his life in the districts of the Madras Presidency; and then in the Foreign and Political Department of the Govt. of India mainly on the frontier. In 1947, Shri K. P. S. Menon who was serving as Agent to the Governor General of India in China, became independent India's first Ambassador to that country and Saraswati Menon moved into the diplomatic world with her husband. After Shri Menon's retirement in 1961, Shri and Smt. Menon have made their home in Ottappalam, their permanent residence. They have four daughters and two sons. Saraswati Menon continues to reside in Ottappalam after Shri Menon passed away in 1982. Smt. Menon emphatically maintains that this book, her first attempt at writing was undertaken with no misconceived ideas of her own talent, but entirely at the insistence and encouragement of her husband and friends like the late Shri K. P. Kesava Menon. They felt that the present generation might find the life she has written about to be so different from their own that it may be of some interest.

This book tells of the life of a Malayalee girl born at the beginning of this century. The nation was slowly waking up; but the British Raj was still supreme. She is the daughter of a High Court Judge and is married to a member of the LC.S. So neither her near relatives nor she are in politics. But the book shows the home of an Indian Government official and later of an I.C.S. officer and then their lives in an independent India.

I have never fancied myself as a writer.

The first time I saw myself in print was in a leading Malayalam newspaper, Mathrubhumi. On my return to my home-town, Ottapalam, in 1961 after forty years of wander- ing in distant lands like China and Russia and in remote corners of India like Baluchistan and the NWFP, Mr. K. P. Kesava Menon, the venerable Editor-in-Chief of the Mathru- bhumi, asked me whether I would write a few articles on my experiences as a diplomat's wife. This I did; and these articles form the nucleus of chapter III of this book.

Some time later, Mr. K. M. Mathew, the distinguished Editor-in-Chief of the Manorama publications, asked me whether I would write about my experiences as an ICS officer's wife for Vanitha, a leading woman's magazine affiliated to the Manorama. Mr. Mathew even prescribed the title: 'Living with a Heaven-born Husband'. The title was too tempting for me to resist and I wrote a few articles on my experiences as an ICS Officer's wife for Vanitha. These are reproduced in chapter II of this book.

Vanitha also published my reminiscences of my early days in Madras and Malabar, under the shadow of my imperious father, Sir C. Sankaran Nair, a redoubtable figure in our preGandhian struggle for independence. These articles, as well as those on my life with a heaven-born husband, were published in English in Bhavan's Journal, by Mr. S. Ramakrishnan, the dynamic Director-Secretary of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan and a great friend of ours. The last chapter of the book, 'Life in Retirement', was specially written to round off my experiences.