Review: Hop, Skip and Jump; Peregrinations of a Diplomat’s Wife by Reba Som

Described as “a memoir, a travelogue and a potted cultural history of India”, Hop, Skip and Jump is an “unforgettable chronicle of a remarkable life”.

In the book’s introduction, Reba Som states:

“The idea came to me on a bright September afternoon as we sat for lunch around a long dining table and looked out of the bay window at the green lawns beneath swaying gulmohar branches… The peacock strutted proudly while the fluttering egrets in the distant park were patches of white on an emerald canvas.. It was idyllic. Our caravans had finally come to rest. Long years in the foreign service, buffered from posting to posting abroad, with periodic halts in Delhi had exhausted us. It was a game of hop, skip and jump. And here we were at the end.”

The first chapter sets the tone, moving as it does, through packed suitcases and piles of books and artifacts gathered over the years of a long marriage. All of it needs to be unpacked and positioned just so in the living room now that the couple has retired and returned to home base. But more important for Reba is the prospect of collecting her thoughts and putting them all down in a document that doubles up as an archival album of her life experiences.

Each chapter corresponds to the time the Soms spent in a specific country. So Brasilia, Brazil (1972–1974) and Copenhagen, Denmark (1974-1976) is followed by Home Posting (1976-1978), which then leads to a stint in Islamabad, Pakistan (1978-1981). And so it goes on until the book closes with Reba Som’s own posting as Founder-Director of the Rabindranath Tagore Centre in Kolkata from 2008 to 2013. Incidentally, during a chance meeting with her in an elevator back in 2013, this writer came away astounded at her knowledge and command of the Tagore school of music. Unsurprisingly, under her directorship, the institution flowered and hosted beautiful cultural programmes like the screening of The River (1951), directed by Jean Renoir, which was shot on the banks of the Ganga. Urban legend has it that during its production, a young Satyajit Ray approached Renoir for advice and guidance on film making. The RTC also staged Ghalib with the late Tom Alter playing the Urdu poet. Of course, the play’s chaste Urdu meant that many uncomprehending members of Kolkata’s bhadralok left half way through.

But all that’s neither here nor there. The reader learns of the couple’s days in Rome when Himachal Som was India’s ambassador to Italy and of the author’s sons, television journalist Vishnu Som and investment banker Abhishek Som to whom the book is dedicated.

The last chapter, IFS Villas, Greater Noida, is a summing up of the couple’s rich lives. A personal take on her travels across the globe and her discovery of herself, the book also gives us glimpses of the political climate of each country in which the Soms lived.

Quite expectedly, the most interesting chapter is the one on Islamabad, Pakistan, between 1978 and 1981:

One morning in early April in 1979, the phone rang and as I picked it up, came the terse voice of our friend from the international press saying, “It is done!” Quick to pick up the message, Himachal with his colleagues rushed to the ambassador’s residence, being among the first to report that Bhutto had been hanged. For days, as journalists hung around for their stories, one continued to meet them but my mind was elsewhere.

This “elsewhere” we learn was the author worrying about her dissertation on Tagore’s music and songs. The dissertation had to be temporarily dropped when her husband’s transfer orders arrived but she did finally complete her thesis and also became a performing artiste and scholar of the songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam, who, like Tagore, is revered in West Bengal and Bangladesh. The same chapter also touches on the hilsa and its rival, the palla – the fish varieties beloved of Bengalis across the world.

The chapter on Rome also touches on the forgotten true-crime story of Shakereh Khaleeli, a mother of four girls. Earlier married to Ambassador Akbar Khalili, she was murdered by her second husband, a self proclaimed godman who went by the name of Swami Shraddhanand. It was left to her daughter Sabah to reopen the case in 1994.

The volume is enriched by beautiful family photographs and pictures of political figures with whom the Soms interacted in their official capacity. We see Reba Som, aged 22, dressed up as a Bengali bride and see her grow into the dignified personality she has become.

In sum, this is an unusual and unputdownable memoir of a diplomat’s wife.

Shoma A Chatterji is an independent journalist. She lives in Kolkata.

The title of Reba Som’s latest book might lead a reader to believe she is just an appendage of her diplomat husband. They couldn’t be further from the truth. This narrative about living out of suitcases as she journeys across the world and establishes herself as an accomplished author and academic, and scholar in Hindustani Classical music and Rabindra Sangeet shows she can definitely hold her own. Indeed, she has also authored such volumes as Margot:Sister Nivedita of Vivekananda (2017), Differences within Consensus: The Left-Right Divide in the Congress 1929-39 (1995), Gandhi, Nehru and Bose: The Making of the Modern Indian Mind (2004), Jawaharlal Nehru and the Hindu Code Bill – Victory of Symbol over Substance?(1994),  Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and his Song (2009) and Subhas Chandra Bose and the Resolution of the Women’s Question (2002).

Described as “a memoir, a travelogue and a potted cultural history of India”, Hop, Skip and Jump is an “unforgettable chronicle of a remarkable life”.

In the book’s introduction, Reba Som states:

“The idea came to me on a bright September afternoon as we sat for lunch around a long dining table and looked out of the bay window at the green lawns beneath swaying gulmohar branches… The peacock strutted proudly while the fluttering egrets in the distant park were patches of white on an emerald canvas.. It was idyllic. Our caravans had finally come to rest. Long years in the foreign service, buffered from posting to posting abroad, with periodic halts in Delhi had exhausted us. It was a game of hop, skip and jump. And here we were at the end.”

The first chapter sets the tone, moving as it does, through packed suitcases and piles of books and artifacts gathered over the years of a long marriage. All of it needs to be unpacked and positioned just so in the living room now that the couple has retired and returned to home base. But more important for Reba is the prospect of collecting her thoughts and putting them all down in a document that doubles up as an archival album of her life experiences.

Each chapter corresponds to the time the Soms spent in a specific country. So Brasilia, Brazil (1972–1974) and Copenhagen, Denmark (1974-1976) is followed by Home Posting (1976-1978), which then leads to a stint in Islamabad, Pakistan (1978-1981). And so it goes on until the book closes with Reba Som’s own posting as Founder-Director of the Rabindranath Tagore Centre in Kolkata from 2008 to 2013. Incidentally, during a chance meeting with her in an elevator back in 2013, this writer came away astounded at her knowledge and command of the Tagore school of music. Unsurprisingly, under her directorship, the institution flowered and hosted beautiful cultural programmes like the screening of The River (1951), directed by Jean Renoir, which was shot on the banks of the Ganga. Urban legend has it that during its production, a young Satyajit Ray approached Renoir for advice and guidance on film making. The RTC also staged Ghalib with the late Tom Alter playing the Urdu poet. Of course, the play’s chaste Urdu meant that many uncomprehending members of Kolkata’s bhadralok left half way through.

But all that’s neither here nor there. The reader learns of the couple’s days in Rome when Himachal Som was India’s ambassador to Italy and of the author’s sons, television journalist Vishnu Som and investment banker Abhishek Som to whom the book is dedicated.

The last chapter, IFS Villas, Greater Noida, is a summing up of the couple’s rich lives. A personal take on her travels across the globe and her discovery of herself, the book also gives us glimpses of the political climate of each country in which the Soms lived.

Quite expectedly, the most interesting chapter is the one on Islamabad, Pakistan, between 1978 and 1981:

One morning in early April in 1979, the phone rang and as I picked it up, came the terse voice of our friend from the international press saying, “It is done!” Quick to pick up the message, Himachal with his colleagues rushed to the ambassador’s residence, being among the first to report that Bhutto had been hanged. For days, as journalists hung around for their stories, one continued to meet them but my mind was elsewhere.

This “elsewhere” we learn was the author worrying about her dissertation on Tagore’s music and songs. The dissertation had to be temporarily dropped when her husband’s transfer orders arrived but she did finally complete her thesis and also became a performing artiste and scholar of the songs of Kazi Nazrul Islam, who, like Tagore, is revered in West Bengal and Bangladesh. The same chapter also touches on the hilsa and its rival, the palla – the fish varieties beloved of Bengalis across the world.

The chapter on Rome also touches on the forgotten true-crime story of Shakereh Khaleeli, a mother of four girls. Earlier married to Ambassador Akbar Khalili, she was murdered by her second husband, a self proclaimed godman who went by the name of Swami Shraddhanand. It was left to her daughter Sabah to reopen the case in 1994.

The volume is enriched by beautiful family photographs and pictures of political figures with whom the Soms interacted in their official capacity. We see Reba Som, aged 22, dressed up as a Bengali bride and see her grow into the dignified personality she has become.

In sum, this is an unusual and unputdownable memoir of a diplomat’s wife.

Shoma A Chatterji is an independent journalist. She lives in Kolkata.