My father Paneer Gurdeep was born in a small remote village in India. Being a young man full of ambition he hustled the streets as a purveyor of mysticism. Put another way he dealt hashish from Kashmir to temples throughout the region to the mystics who became even more mystical after ingesting copious amounts of dope. The Holy Man was usually a very stoned man at least in our region. Paneer managed to crawl out of a life of subsistence farming and onto the streets and slums of Bombay as it was then named. He peddled his dope to the unfortunate and to certain decadent and adventurous Europeans living in Bombay. According to Paneer opium was for the depraved and hashish for the enlightened. He made a very good living and employed sub dealers of the highest caste many university students and no lepers please. He greased the palms of law enforcement if such a concept of law or enforcement of it existed in Bombay. He had a modest house with servants and his neighbours had no idea of the wares Paneer was selling mostly because he had underlings to do the dirty work.
My dad was a handsome man not wanting an arranged marriage and the suffocating presence of a mother-in-law. Not only that he hated Indian food and preferred steak and kidney pie over tandoori and curry. It so happened he frequented clubs where the colonist’s sought entertainment and cheap Indian whisky. In the Blue Magnolia Club he fell for Juanita Wallabong a Welsh singer who at that time had a rather poor talent applied to singing American blues. Juanita had flaming red hair a magnet for my father. Although a performer Juanita suffered horrific anxiety and tanked up on far too much gin before her performances. Some nights she had the voice of Billie Holiday and others no voice at all. Well dear old dad fell like a ton of bricks for Juanita and her red hair (which was dyed).
Well this and that lead to more this and that and finally to marriage. My father persuaded Juanita to give up live performances and instead record in the studio that my dad bought for her. She perfected a new style of blues called” Bombay Blues”. She had several hits in Europe and the United States and really cleaned up her bottle consumption. Thank goodness as I was born in 1959 on a Punjab Air Flight from Memphis to Bombay and the last thing I needed was fetal alcohol poisoning.
As a bundle of joy I was brought back to our now very swank quarters in the colonial quarter of Bombay. Dear Dad had long ago “sold” his dope business to the Dean of the Bombay School of Law and had taken up gold mining!
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