The Mehta family, written down
A haveli in the old city, one suitcase across two oceans, and thepla for every journey.
This is what a Famvaults wiki looks like once a family has been at it for a while. Read any article — the links, the contents lists and the family tree all work. Every family here is invented, and the pictures are illustrations.
6 articles
Hansaben Mehta
Hansaben Mehta (1929–2011), Ba to everyone, was born in the haveli in Khadia, crossed the Indian Ocean in 1952 to join her husband in Nairobi, and crossed again to Leicester twenty years later. She…
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The Haveli in Khadia
The family house in a pol in Khadia, Ahmedabad's old city, from the 1890s until it was sold in 1984. Carved wooden balconies, a courtyard, a door studded with brass, and a family of five generations…
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Ba's Methi Thepla
Fenugreek flatbreads that keep for days, which is why Ba made them for every journey: the ship to Mombasa in 1952, the flight to London in 1972, and every coach trip to Wembley after that. Rolled…
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Diwali in Nairobi, 1971
The family's last Diwali in Kenya, at the house in Parklands, before the move to Leicester the next spring. Ba decided it would be the biggest the street had seen, and invited the street.
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Pravinbhai Mehta
Pravinbhai Mehta (1924–1999) married Hansaben in 1947 and left for Nairobi alone in 1950 to work in a cousin's cloth shop. He sent for her when he could afford a room with a window. In Leicester he…
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The Suitcase from Mombasa
How one brown suitcase crossed the Indian Ocean, then a continent, and came to hold every photograph the family owns. Ba wrote each address it lived at inside the lid.
ReadAnd the family behind them
Every person can point at the articles written about them, so the tree doubles as a way into the wiki.
Family tree
- &Pravinbhai Mehta1924–1999
- &Rekha Mehtab. 1952
- &Kiran Shahb. 1949
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