For Valentine's Day, Morning Edition commentator Sandip Roy shares a family love story from 70 years ago.
I always knew that my mother's aunt Debika was the most beautiful of all the great-aunts. I didn't know that when she was young, she jumped off a moving train for love.
She is now 90. Bent with age, she shuffles with a walker. But she's still radiant, her hair perfectly dyed.
It sounds like a typical Bollywood story. Boy meets girl in pre-independence India. They fall in love. Her family says no way. The boy came from the same clan. That was regarded almost as marriage between siblings. And there were far more suitable boys for such a beauty, like the son of a top-ranking civil servant. Debika says her uncle and brother kept two guns handy to shoot over-eager Romeos on sight.
So one night in 1941, she decided to escape. She packed a bundle with everything she needed: a couple of blouses, a petticoat and two albums — one with family photos, the other with postcards of Hollywood movie stars like Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert.
She put a roll of false hair on the pillow so it looked like she was sleeping. There were dozens of servants to be evaded, big dogs patrolling the yard and many locked doors. She retraces her steps for me more than 70 years later.
She left barefoot, in the kind of sari housemaids wore, to look like a young woman going to work in the breaking dawn. Her fiance was waiting to take her to the train station, but she panicked when she realized the taxi driver recognized her. She was afraid her powerful uncle would show up at the next station with guns. So the runaways decided to jump off before the station. Guards came running, but they nonchalantly strolled away as if they jumped off trains every day.
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