A week or two with the Bedis

This is Ranga Bedi, at work in his study at his wonderful home in Bangalore. He and his wife Umi - who began their married life as tea planters in Upper Assam - were my very generous hosts earlier in the month. I am writing a biography of Ranga's mother, Freda Bedi - and here you can see Ranga looking through the rich cache of letters, documents and photos relating to his mother which he very kindly allowed me to go through. 

On the wall behind Ranga is Umi's painting of Kabir Bedi as a novice monk. Kabir (yes, that Kabir Bedi) is Ranga's younger brother, and in the 1950s, when Freda became absorbed by Buddhism during trips to Burma, he accompanied her and for a while was a novice in a Buddhist order.

I also visited Kabir and his wife Parveen during my trip to India this month, and they too were enormously welcoming and generous with access to documents - and were happy to share personal memories. I am very grateful to them.

Ranga's life in some ways maps Freda's own (if you want to find out more about Freda, I've recently written online pieces about her for an English newspaper and for an Indian website).

His parents, Freda Houlston and B.P.L. Bedi, married in Oxford in June 1933. They moved to Berlin where B.P.L. had a research scholarship. By the time they arrived there - after a motor tour across Europe as a honeymoon - Freda was pregnant. Ranga was born in the German capital - brought up in the huts his parents built at Model Town in Lahore - educated at Tyndale Biscoe school in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar - and by the time his mother became an ordained Tibetan Buddhist nun, Ranga was working on the tea estates.

Both Ranga and Kabir - and indeed their sister, Guli, who lives in the US - are immensely proud of their parents. 

And here's perhaps my favourite portrait photo of her - probably taken in Lahore in the early 1940s, when she would have been 30 or a little over..

Copyright: Bedi family archive