Missing from Action

Life goes on in the Garden... relentlessly like this train

Amid all the fun and games in yesterday’s Holi celebration, there was one dampener: A number of members, very dear to us, were not to be seen. Their absence was felt all the more because they have invariably been the first to

Razia (l) returns from a trip to Canada and the U.S.

show up at the Garden whenever there is anything special on in the Club. The worst part was that they had stopped coming even earlier.
Nahid Khan was one. She is arguably the most regular among us for the exercises, but she had chosen this period to leave Mumbai to see her daughter. Karun Sharma was another. For the time he was around, few could match him on punctuality and attendance. He gave us a long talk on happiness and went off to Delhi, leaving us to our devices. That was a month ago.
Then there is Kanta Sharma. We heard she was admitted to Belle Vue in a critical state

Mallika Kagzi

early this month (ref post of March 4) and later, she was shifted to Criticare, Juhu. Now we are told she has been moved out again and admitted to the Sir H.N.Reliance Foundation Hospital in Charni Road. Tragedy is doctors are still clueless on diagnosing her. Her condition remains serious.
But the one we are missing the most is Mallika Kagzi, our president. Never to skip a single occasion in the Club, she has always been full of heart and to us, the very soul of every event, be it the Republic Day or Independence Day, a festival or anyone’s birthday. Yesterday’s Holi celebration felt incomplete for all members without her presence. Last heard, she was in Surat.
In all this, Razia Khan’s appearance today in the Garden came as a welcome beam of sunlight. She too had been away for long, to Canada and the U.S. and this morning she had brought us chocolates and crackers to mark her return. But the bigger news is that her grandson, Zaiyan Khan has been selected out of 3,000,000 contestants for the national ‘hackathon’ on April 1 – a collaborative computer programming event during which he will have to fry his brains with 40,000 other nerds for 36 long hours. We wish him the very best.
Lt Col Angad Singh (retd):
We missed a number of our colleagues on Holi Divas. The absentees must also have missed the joyous and spontaneous happiness on faces of every one. We wish Kanta Sharma a speedy recovery from her illness. The arrival of Razia was welcomed by everyone. Hope she will now join us in our daily activities. We all eagerly await our president from Surat.