Our taxi pulls into a service station near Dekhu, in the Khalapur Taluka, traveling along the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. We stretch our legs, use the facilities, and I order hot chai from a roadside stall—one each for Nima, my son, and me, plus another for the driver.
We are heading to Pune, having spent a couple of days acclimatizing in Mumbai after the passing of my mother-in-law the week before. It has been a reflective couple of weeks. A lot of looking, thinking, and remembering.
And Dekhu got me thinking.
The place felt familiar, though I couldn’t recall ever stopping here. I’d traveled the old Bombay-Pune Highway countless times in Lal Dabba and AC buses over the years, though these days, taxis are affordable enough to spare these middle-aged bones the extra toll.
Dekhu. It sounded exactly like Deek.
It’s a Romani word from my gypsy youth. Tek a deek at this or that. Romani carries its India origins with it. A millennium of westward migration never fully erasing its origins. Deek was just one of many words I discovered I already knew when I first arrived in Mumbai back in 1995. Chor(i), kushti, pani, chappal, gorja. Romani words with indian relations, still audible across the centuries.
But Deek—look, see, observe—is exactly what I had spent weeks doing. Just watching life as it passed in front of me, reminiscing and remembering.
I had started a memoir two weeks prior. My mother-in-law’s passing made me wonder how much of her life would inevitably be lost to time. Stories that, within a single generation, would vanish. I didn’t want that to happen. So, I started writing my story, and naturally, its intersection with hers.
So, Deek it is. Come tek a deek at this: my life, with roots in 1970s North East England, its tentacles reaching across another continent, and the long journey back to a northern town and its fish and chip suppers.