A voyage to remember… 110 years on |
How did a Tata family visionary survive a Mediterranean Sea shipwreck and gift Bombay some premier public service institutions?
Sir Ratan Tata (centre) and his wife Lady Navajbai Tata were accompanied on the journey by his personal physician Dr Jivraj Mehta (left) and his secretary, Pirosha Mistri. Illustrations/Uday Mohite
Some stories are special for the manner in which they find you. This one came 28 years ago in the warmest way. I find myself thinking about it again, as tomorrow marks a month since the original storyteller — one of the country’s most elegant and pioneering personalities — passed on.
Simone Tata had called me unexpectedly, with an engrossing tale that involved her illustrious in-laws — Sir Ratan Tata, the younger son of Jamsetji Tata, and his wife Lady Navajbai Tata — caught in the wreck of the steamship SS Arabia, on November 6, 1916. Excited, I all but jumped hearing her ask, “Would you like details of the episode?”
The timing of her narrative was somewhat serendipitous. March 1998. Exactly when Titanic fever gripped city moviegoers, three months after the Hollywood release of James Cameron’s epic success. It coincidentally opened in local cinemas here the very week that the visionary Mrs Tata, founding force behind the iconic Lakme cosmetics brand and Westside retail chain, shared this significant information.
She added an interesting aside to the account: her friend Neville Wadia had mentioned to her how, as a five-year-old, he was once aboard the same ship with his father, Sir Ness Wadia.
The voyage of this P&O liner, in the middle of World War I, took place barely four years following the ill-fated sinking of the Titanic. England-bound, the SS Arabia was torpedoed by a German U-boat (short for Undersea, or Unterseeboote as German naval submarines were known). The Arabia, however, sank with a lower toll; fatalities totalled no more than 11 engine crew members.
Pirosha Mistri, Sir Ratan Tata’s secretary, recorded the experience in his journal
It was believed the passengers were spared despite the fact that their vessel had embarked before Diwali on Kalichaudas. “An inauspicious day according to the Hindus for undertaking even a short journey,” Pirosha Mistri, Sir Ratan’s secretary from 1901, later wrote in The Bombay Chronicle.
In attendance with the Tatas and Mistri was Sir Ratan’s trusted personal physician, Jivraj Mehta. The reputed practitioner........