Having failed to leave Darjeeling for Sikkim, I needed another plan.

I had by now been traveling for two and half months. I knew some things. “Right, then,” I must have thought, “Is there a tourist center?” Or maybe I asked the desk clerk at my hotel what I might do for the next few days.

The next few days included Easter. I did not grow up in a religious family, but we had always hunted for Easter eggs, dyeing and crayoning them in kitchen after kitchen. House after house.

Darjeeling did have a tourist center. They told me I could hike up to Sandakphu and see Kachenjunga from a distance. Sandakphu is the highest point in the Indian state of West Bengal, at 11,929 feet. Kachenjunga, the 3rd highest mountain in the world. The tourist center also told me that, since said hike required a knowledge of trails and two overnight stays, I should hire a guide. And, by the way, the guides were outside waiting.

Whether I chose the man in the knit hat, or he chose me, I do not remember. I wondered if I was nuts. “Is this safe?” I thought, “Should I really wander off into the mountains of India by myself with a young man who speaks almost no English and whose name I cannot decipher?” I figured that it would be OK.

Luckily, I was right. We have to remember the context.

My guide provided me with someone else’s  hat and jacket. That was that. Off we went.

Of course, to the young girl above, my expedition was just a morning walk with Grandmother. You know how young European teenagers carrying huge backpacks lumber through American financial districts, surrounded by office workers in broadcloth? That was me, in sneakers and a parka along the path.

A path that fronted mountains,

…and native rhododendrons. Today rhododendrons decorate California’s ranch houses like outdoor wallpaper, remnants of mid-century landscaping that knew nothing of droughts or xeriscaping. Along the India-Nepal border of 1982, these were  fierce shrubs indeed. Like zoo animals in the wild.

We walked all day, until the light began to temper. Arriving at a little village, we set down our packs.

Fog rolled in. Here we were to spend the night. The family made a living offering sleeping space to passing hikers.

This is a picture of the bed in the front room. Pages from movie magazines decorated and insulated the walls..

I wrote,

I find myself in a village without electricity, where they’ve never seen a watch that beeps, where Tibetan flags wave and everyone speaks Nepali…The grass is green enough to swim in. Colors take on deeper hues in silence, deepest of all in silence enclosed by fog. Even me, in red pants and the old man’s sweater, even I take on a deeper hue.

My guide and I ate with the family, squatting around a large pot heated over a fire on the ground. I don’t remember feeling apprehensive, or uncomfortable in the slightest.

I wrote more, perhaps suffering by now from slight altitude intoxication,

Quiet nights fall darker than nights lit by cries and horns and brilliant spitting. Nights like an open door, easy, safe and provoking thoughts of eternity. Birds. Birds and children. Birds, children and shivers. A flag waving, seaweed in a wave, silent breezes. Bell ringing to bring in night free of spirits. An empty fullness of self.

Rereading my journals, 30 years later, I want to tell young people that most of the time it is enough to simply observe.

Time came for sleep. I was ushered, respectfully and with ceremony, to a large room high above the pig pen. It was the family place of worship, empty except for a bed and a large altar. They showed me how they were locking the room so I would be safe. With a key, from the outside.

I slept.

I woke up. And I had to pee. My apologies to you and to my Aunt Priscilla for the use of this term in print. Not that I don’t say the word, not being a prissy sort, but it feels quite odd to type. After careful consideration, I decided that euphemism would be worse. This is often true.

I was infinitely too embarrassed to wake the non-English speaking family and communicate my problem in sign language. I was also quite clear that I could not use any of the bowls on the altar, although the thought crossed my mind. Talk about breaking protocol. And the room was way too high up to exit through the window.

Which left one option. Thus I clambered, pants off, into the window frame, and squatted half in and half out. A genetic capability for optimism kept me laughing even while trying not to fall through the window. I do not think I worried much about toilet paper, under the circumstances.

I can only hope the pigs didn’t mind.

Next morning the grandmother, or she might have been the mother, had someone translate that one of her little girls had expired, December 11th. I noted that in my journal, and said nothing about my nighttime manoeuvres. Priorities correct. What do you do when you’re 25, in the foothills of the Himalayas, listening to tragedies that you get to leave behind? Say thank you for the food and pay your bill. So I did.

Off we went. A little boy bade me Namaste.

The climb grew steep. I followed my guide. The effort felt very close to too much, but I kept going. If you think about it, I could have asked to stop. Again, youth.

We arrived at Sandakphu in the dark. We shared the traveler’s hut with two men, one named Peter Spottiswood, and one, apparently, Helmut. Or so my notes tell me.

Easter Sunday dawned foggy. Had we been granted we clear skies, you’d see all kinds of mountains at my back. Instead, all I’ve got to show is a borrowed hat and jacket, city wool pants, and American sneakers. Also a girl grin. I didn’t mind the lack of promised view at all. Who can mourn vistas when you’ve peed out a window onto Nepali-speaking pigs?

I wrote,

I climbed up to 12,300 feet, but I didn’t see any mountains. The chocolate Easter egg I had bought was broken in the backpack, so I shared it with my guide & the owner of this guest house. I didn’t see a cross, a bonnet, a rabbit or a rising soul.

…I know what Kachenjunga looks like though. I saw it from the bus.

The next day we ran down all the mountains in one go. I wrote,

I have always had such a fear of going downhill. I hate the feeling that at any minute I might lose control and go rolling away over the stores. Well, Peter Spottiswood told me how to walk downhill. “Just let gravity do it,” he said.

I remember feeling scared and exhilarated by our pell-mell descent.

Now that I’m 56, and living in Northern California suburban comfort, if I let gravity do it I’d never leave my faux suede sofa.  Feet on the coffee table. I wonder if it’s a cheap trick to note that you’ve got to put yourself atop a mountain to be able to trust gravity and call it friend. Pigs, of course, pigs are all serendipity.

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April 7th, 1982

April 8th, 1982

What to do in Darjeeling as the smell of onions filters through my bedroom and the sound of hawking repeats itself.

1. Get map of Darjeeling @ tourist office
2. Talk to travel agent
3. Pick up permission
4. Go to Indian Airlines
5. See orchid place?
6. Go to post office
7. Go to bank
8. Buy shawl

I wrote from Darjeeling, after an easing sojourn on the Andaman Nicobar islands. I hoped to travel from Darjeeling to Sikkim, a country then almost unvisited by Westerners. But I needed permission from the Indian Government. In 1982, problematic.

Let’s back up. I had indeed flown to Bagdogra. Somebody ought to start a novel “I had flown to Bagdogra.” However, in real long ago life, I disembarked and made my way to the train station in Silguri. By cab? I don’t remember. This is what I found.

Silguri was then one of the poorest places in India. Inside, this. I believe many of the clothes were made from rice sacks, just as they used flour sacks in the American West.

A group of travelers passed by, possibly a family.

I saw, and I remember today, that one of this party was blind, one crippled, one young. One threw up on the platform, right after I took this picture. I was horrified, as much at my rudeness in having photographed them in their exigency as anything. I felt as though finally I had met the Indian poverty I was supposed to find. I remember thinking, the dwarf is leading the blind who is caring for the sick. It was a very large thought.

This was the lowest point of my trip, in terms of those I met or saw. It was not the lowest point for me, as I was on the homeward stretch. Only a month left in India.

I wish that group might have wrought transformation, sent me packing to Mother Theresa. I was struck, certainly. But those of us moved primarily by words and logic are unlikely to rapidly change course from emotion.

If I consider, India made me a kinder thinker – more tolerant, more forgiving. But it didn’t make me Mother Theresa. Maybe in my next life. Maybe in my next decade. Maybe the point of writing these stories is to make me ever kinder and more generous. I do not know.

I see now there were two little boys in the background of that photo. Why do images of children looking sideways always seem so meaningful? Because the future is out of sight?

To  get to Darjeeling, one boarded an old-fashioned steam locomotive. I wasn’t too excited about steam, or locomotives. Those engines produce an awful lot of cinders, after all, otherwise known as things that get into your eyes when you look out the window. And who knew if tea and toast would be provided, as was the practice on regular trains?

A Western man was filming these guys. I cropped him out of the photo. It’s my memory and I can if I want to. But I owe you the truth about what was going on. I think most boys like trains more than most girls.

We left the station. Much puffing and metal-on-metal screeches ensued. We rose, steeply. Whether or not tea was served I don’t remember. But I do remember that tea bushes grew all around.

And so for the first time I saw the Indian hills. Or sort of saw them. Darjeeling is misty and much is often hidden. The tea likes it that way. As do parched Westerners, roasted to a crisp by the plains and jungles of India’s lower elevations.

Back to the To Do list. A theme, if you will. I arose from my damp bed, and had breakfast on a pale blue veranda. By the way, in 1982 tea in Darjeeling tasted fizzy, like mythical nectar of the gods. I have no idea why. I’ve tried to find that taste ever since, to no avail.

After breakfast, I set off to the government office for item #3, “pick up permission.”  I remember the office very well, even to dimensions. Maybe humiliation reinforces remembrance. It was a small room, occupied by one smallish bald man. He sat behind a grey metal desk, about 4 feet by 8 feet in size. All available surfaces were covered in piles of typed papers, each pile between 3 and 14 inches high. The windows were at least 16 feet high, and surrounded by dark wood shutters. A ceiling fan rotated. The papers should have flown about, but the ceiling was high, the fan ineffective.

I explained that I had sent the paperwork in for Sikkim travel permission. He hunted for evidence. “Madam, we do not have it.” I pleaded. He shook his head in the uniquely Indian rotation. Neck still, head pivoting like the tongue of a grandfather clock. “No, no, no. I hear you. Still no.” I ranted. Again, “Madam, I am sorry.” My angst and frustration genuine, in the back of my mind I thought to try for sympathy. I cried. After all, I’d been besieged for kisses repeatedly. Surely the official could relent for a blonde Western girl?

No.

And with that, there I was, high up in Darjeeling, without a plan, a schedule, or a track to follow.

I was angry at myself.  I knew I’d left the submission of my request too late, and in so doing had foregone an experience that would never be replicated. Because the next best thing to becoming Mother Theresa is learning where one can, to this day I try very hard to acknowledge my mistakes. To own up where I fail, and give my small acts of virtue their own clean place to sit.

I don’t really mind, any more, that I didn’t get to Sikkim. I’ve been a lot of places since. Looking back, I only regret my own personal failures of courage, compassion, or honesty. Hill kingdoms optional.

*Note to self, 30 years later. Who was Fred Bottoms? An oil engineer from the Andaman Sheraton? We will never know. I do remember Paul et Isabelle. They made it to Sikkim. And I will follow this post up fairly rapidly with the story about Out Of Darjeeling, because cliffhangers are over-rated.

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So.

Explanation: In 1982, at the age of 25, I took 3 months to travel in India by myself. I had a self-set project to write about the Indian film industry. Unsurprisingly, an awful lot of What The Heck Is This! happened too.

Guide: If you click the India category, all the posts will show up. But if you’d like to read through them sequentially, or just sample a few, here are all the links and post titles so far, on one page. Having just reread it all myself, it’s not yet a fully integrated narrative. But I could get it there with a little editing.

1. Finding Oneself In India, 1982
2. Telephones, Addresses, Movies. India, 1982
3. A Luxury Coach To Ajanta And Ellora, India, 1982
4. Udaipur, Egrets, Trains. India, 1982
5. Rajastan, Weddings, Measurements. India, 1982
6. And Stately Boulevards Precede Us. India, 1982
7. Movie Stars, Marble, A Sitar Player, India, 1982.
8. Ardor, Red Dye, Foreign Girls. India, 1982
9. Stupas, Tigers, Disco Beats, India, 1982
10. Pearls, Chemicals, Heat and Dust. India, 1982
11. Bathers, Men, Ghouls. India, 1982
12. South, South, South. India, 1982.
13. Wheels, Feet, Temperature, India, 1982.
14. Calcutta, Andaman, Blue. India, 1982.

As we see, I could use a copy editor to enforce consistent punctuation. Never mind.

After tomorrow’s story, I estimate about 5 remain. So, one way or another, I’ll most likely manage to complete the tale. A goal I’ve had since 1983, I’d say. Thank you for helping me keep my internal commitments.

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When I was young, we used the idea of “Calcutta” as an archetype for any poverty. But in April of 1982, after weeks traveling the rest of India, Calcutta itself felt like recognizable civilization. Bookstores everywhere.  People impassioned about the tradition of Bengali poetry and film. And despite the city’s physical decay, entrepreneurs all around.

Once I recovered from the rogue bacteria of my train ride up the coast, I scheduled a phone interview with Mrinal Sen. I asked simple questions, he gave complex answers. As experts do.

I also took care of a few tasks that cities permit, taking tuk-tuks and bicycle rickshaws around looking for English-language books,

and visiting the post office.

This man made a living by mailing other people’s stuff. For the illiterate, he wrote addresses. For the busy, he navigated post office bureaucracy and delays. I asked him to post a bottle of Ayurvedic massage oil to a friend in New York. She told me later it arrived, smashed to bits. I couldn’t explain to her why that was really OK. My explanation would have been too bound up in the man’s skin condition, his slicked back hair and black umbrella. I would have needed economic theory to explain cost of labor, delays of clerks, and the optimism of small businesses everywhere.

Then things got very blue.

I took an airplane to the Andaman Nicobar Islands. We landed on a strip in the middle of a prickly field.

I wasn’t supposed to take pictures, the soldiers told me, all uniformed as they were.

I had reservations at the only Western hotel on the island. A Sheraton, if I remember, still under construction. On the edge of a very blue sea.

The rooms were little cabins, each with their own entry to the tropical out of doors. I ate in the large, palm-frond covered, open air restaurant. The only other people at the hotel were Texans, there to map the bottom of the Indian Ocean in the developed world’s undying search for oil. But they left me alone, their collegial endeavor more compelling than one traveling girl.

I heard them laugh, I remember the sound of clinking glasses. I wrote,

I have been very glad to spend these four days on the island. Not to move more than a few feet in the morning, from bed to table to deck chair. This hotel room is beautiful, wood floors, handmade bedspreads, and fresh flowers every morning. Why do I feel so small?

Looking back, I see that this stay was my vacation from the India trip, and I wanted it to resemble vacations in developed nations. The sound of jackhammers, from the ongoing construction, began to drive me nuts. I went to the hotel desk, and asked, “Can someone tell me where to find quiet?” Someone could. They assigned a staffer, Matthew. He took me down to the dock, where we got into a little motor boat. Over the blue sea we went to the next island.

It was empty.

I mean, empty. The island had been a pineapple plantation for years. Was now reverting to itself. We walked on wheel tracks. The luxury of beaches is as much about what isn’t there as what is.

I sat on a rock for a while, Matthew under the trees. I swam. We didn’t talk. The horizon had returned and I could see things from a distance. It’s much better to feel small under a big sky than surrounded by people you don’t know and a civilization you don’t understand. Quiet is far less isolating when there’s no one you need to talk to, but someone’s there just in case.

I was beginning to understand not only India, but my own loneliness. I wrote,

I miss being loved. I want never to have to make an effort again or try or have hassles. I am worn to the breaking point from planning and arranging. I can’t schedule another thing. I just want to find someone to take me on a hike through beautiful mountains, feed me, and put me in a sleeping bag at night.

I never want to hear another regretful Indian voice tell me, “No madame, it is not possible.” When I get back to the US, I am never again going to refrain from saying, “Take care of me.” To hell with always taking the difficult way.

The hard part is to make it look easy. The best way to make it look easy is for actually to be easy. The puritan curse of believing that easy is evil, lady. Easy is smart. Lisa, from now on say to yourself twelve times a day, “Easy is smart, easy is smart, easy is smart.”

I am only now, at 54 going on 55, understanding what my 25-year old self said on a beach, in the middle of the Andaman sea, on a retired pineapple plantation. Easy doesn’t mean no work, easy means using the majority of your talents well, in the company of people who support you.

We took the boat back. On the dock a fisherman mended his nets with his toes, the sea behind, persisting in blue and calm.

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I spent the last day in Kerala writing thank you notes and getting an Ayurvedic massage. Looking back, I am relieved to see that I thanked everyone who helped. Because gratitude adds meaning, thank you notes are a good way of structuring otherwise random events. Besides, I would have hated to seem ungrateful.

The massage, on the other hand, confused me. I was used to the Western version, lie down, drift off.  While I did lie down, under a white tent, on a table, over white sand, the massage itself was complex and demanding. It made me dizzy. I remember feeling a little daunted, hoisting my bags again in the heat, off  to the train station. Where monks at the ticket counter seemed to sense my disequilibrium.

I wrote,

“Back to Madras. I am very tired. I still feel the fingers of the Vedic massage running over my back, and I feel my energy redistributing itself.”

That turned out to be an understatement.

I arrived in Madras. The plan was to head for Calcutta, with a brief stop at the ruins of Konarak on the way. Konarak is a 13th-century temple described in Wikipedia as follows:

“Famous as much for its imposing dimensions and faultless proportions as for the harmonious integration of architectural grandeur with plastic allegiance.”

I have no idea what that means. Konark, as it’s called now, is a big temple made of porous stone. That will do for our purposes here.

Mr. Barrister, still quite the gentleman, met me at the Madras station. He put me on the overnight to Calcutta, entrusting me into the care of a woman with two children. She fed me. Now do you know what came next? I didn’t. I wrote.

“Being on a train going to Calcutta is much like being on a train going anywhere else in India. Out the window I see red dirt, as opposed to the grey dirt or yellow dirt I’ve seen in other places, but it’s still basically Indian dirt….For some reason I feel strongly sick to my stomach.. I also feel my glands swelling in my neck. I think that Vedic massage stirred up all my lingering infections. Yuck…I’d like to take a nap but I feel somewhat compelled to watch the scenery go by. To hell with it. I’m going to bed.”

And a few hours later,

“Proceeded to go to bed, sleep, wake up, sit by the window, and then get severely sick to my stomach. Nothing like puking into a dirty toilet on a moving train. I think it was those molasses-tasting things from the lady I’m sharing the compartment with, the lady into whose care Mr. Barrister committed so seriously at the beginning of the voyage.”

The massage might have redistributed my energy but some simple single-celled organisms did me in. I was so thirsty. All the warnings I’d heard about third-word water were loud in my mind but I was too sick to care. I drank from a fountain at a train station during a brief stop.

In the morning we arrived in Bhubaneswar, and somehow I got myself to Konarak. I walked the grounds. It must have been over 100 degrees in the shade.  I didn’t really want to be surrounded by stone lions and all the wheels of the Sun God’s chariot.

The sun was the strongest I’d ever felt. This is a lion, I think.

The train for Calcutta wouldn’t leave until later that evening. I found a restaurant with tablecloths and air conditioning. I remember I took some aspirin, or Tylenol.

I was by then very feverish. My thermometer, for I did have one, registered over 104 degrees, and I couldn’t make it go down. This scared me. The walls of the restaurant were covered in dark red silk, or else I hallucinated. The tablecloths were white, which is probably true. I remember standing in the elegant restaurant bathroom, running cold water from the faucet over my wrists, looking in the mirror, aware, “I am on the edge.”  Jolted from complacency I hadn’t even known I felt. I waited for the train.

When I arrived in Calcutta I wanted only to get to my hotel.

But there were no cabs outside the station. No tik-tiks, those little motorized 3-seaters. Not even a bicycle rickshaw. Only a wheeled conveyance, as Jane Austen would say, and a man who would run me into town.

I could tell I wasn’t dying. I knew that even sick I led a safer and more robust life than 95% of India’s population. So I remember thinking, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” as I watched the man run in the heat. I don’t remember if he had any shoes but the strike of his feet on the pavement vibrated through my sit bones.

I also remember that when we arrived at the hotel, the running man tried to overcharge me terribly, and despite organisms and liberal guilt I argued. Why not just let him cheat me? Where was my compassion then? Humans have more than one cell. The hotel pointed me to a doctor, who prescribed antibiotics and the equivalent of Pedialyte. I spent a day and a half eating room service rice in my hotel room and drinking Kingfisher beer.

Of course I recovered. Looking back all these years later, I am perhaps sorry I didn’t pay that running man twice what he asked, but I still don’t believe in taking advantage of the helpless.

I’m certainly glad I didn’t end up in a hospital in Bhubaneswar.

It’s one of the tasks of my particular midlife, to recognize sorrows and dangers, veined though they are by the safeguards of privilege.

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From Madras I took a train to Madurai. A city of many and large temples, Madurai also had elephants in chains. Worshipers launched pats of butter at statues of the gods, both Ganesha and the blue one. Hinduism is a religion of many characters, and I never quite figured out who had done what with whom.  But that’s the good thing about travel,  you create a capacious folder, labeled only, “Unknown,” and so many things can fit inside.

From Madurai another train, south, and more south. For the first time, I was in a land with enough water for a verdant landscape. And maybe by then I knew some things. It was March 22nd. I’d been in India since February 9th, and would leave, five weeks later, on May 1st. Although I didn’t note the milestone, my trip had reached its midpoint. I wrote about stopping along the way in Rameswaram,

“Not only am I wearing flowers looped in my hair, not only is my wrist bangled, but I also know that the train will stop here long enough for me to get out and get breakfast. Men are crowded around a stand where they serve what I recognize as dhosas, puris, and what looks like some other sort of South Indian thing. Most people are eating puris, only what looks like the onions in sauce you eat on hotdogs in New York. I keep thinking I should diet. I eat the puris anyway and they are light, warm, crunchy and delicious. I clean my banana leaf.”

I was headed for Trivandrum, now officially called Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. It’s a great story, Kerala. Colonized early by Christian travelers, the state was at once Communist, matriarchal, Christian, highly literate, wealthy from Kerala workers in Dubai, and almost Chinese in aesthetic. I know. Even now my eyes widen at that sentence.

The impact of those odd socioeconomic facts, on a 25-year woman traveling alone, can’t be underestimated. I wrote,

“The train ride here sparkled with auspicious signs…tracks run along the side of mountains, steep, green mountains which cast outlines on the sky. Banana trees grow like sea anemones, the entire landscape looks rich enough and crowded with enough life to be a tidepool… Me, I’m sitting inside alive. Feeling for the first time since I got to India that I like it here. Trivandrum, so far, has reinforced that banana-tree inspired feeling.”

I would wish for all of us, banana-tree inspired feelings. But more than the landscape contributed to my feelings of comfort. The houses looked suspiciously like Art Deco versions of 1950s California ranches.

Most of the people were working. Laborers read the newspaper, taking lunch breaks on the roofs of the the houses they built. Women walked around together, in groups, in pairs, and even on their own. I wrote,

“I even saw a boy and girl flirting together, standing by the side of the road in casual conversation. If I were ever to live in India, I think I’d live in Trivandrum. Communist government and all.”

There are party politics, and then there are the greater politics of gender and money that drive our choices. Besides, the Communist Party bunting was quite lovely.

Flowers for one’s hair were readily available.

If I look back, it seems as though India orchestrated a little moment of happiness for me in Kerala. The journey up until that point had been characterized so thoroughly by loneliness and harassment, solitude and men I didn’t want or did but couldn’t have in that society. A well-to-do matriarchal culture made all the difference.

I interviewed another film maker, on the veranda of a hotel, remnants of colonial architecture all around us. We drank tea from white china. I remember being treated as though I were in fact a journalist. So important, at 25, to be recognized.

I took a day off. I traveled down to Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India. I met up with a traveling group of newlyweds and friends. What a pleasure to keep company with women, even if they were less interested in me than were their husbands. We walked right down to the sea. We talked. You can see, if you look closely, I’m wearing ankle bracelets. I bought them at a market stall.

The next day, and it must have been the next day because I’m wearing a different shirt and I would not have changed in public,  my new friends told me to put my feet in the southern sea. They took my picture in the Laccadive Sea. This is as far south as you can get in India.

Let’s pretend this isn’t me. Let’s pretend this is any young woman, traveling, at 25, in India, 1982. Because although this is a personal story I’m curious about its implications.

We notice most of all the young woman is smiling, and obviously squinting against the sun. Why isn’t she wearing sunglasses? Youthful ignorance of degeneration? Let’s consider her shape. What a narrow waist. Science tells us now that a small waist-to-hip ratio indicates fertility. She has broad shoulders, suggesting sturdiness, whether real or not. Perhaps it’s not surprising I was pursued. The men were not searching for my personality, me as I felt myself to be at 25.

My understanding of myself was beside the point, yet it was all I knew.

When you’re 54, looking back at 25 standing shin-deep in the Indian Ocean, waist wrapped in a blue sash, you understand that youth imagines only itself. I was in India, in a Communist, prosperous, literate, matriarchal state. I was 25, unmarried, blonde, and physically auspicious. Standing in the sea means water above all. Pay attention to the splashing.

I remember feeling that my interior life was larger than the sky, and far more full of danger. Middle age is such a pleasure, in this context, now that youth is done.

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One might think a trip to India would be about something other than archetypal interactions between men and women. One would be wrong, at least for me. At least in the first half of my 1982 trip. Embarrassing, but true.

Let’s continue. Lisa at 25, traveling in India alone, comes to the city then known as Madras and now as Chennai.

Madras was very boring, save the general newness of India, which by then startled me about as much as an overdue due gas bill. The city offered little beyond British colonial buildings, sweltering mid-March heat, and seemingly endless temples and statues carved from sandstone. And, of course, various film industry personnel.

I still marvel at the past willingness of prominent people in the Indian film industry to meet with a young American. My reporting credentials consisted of two letters, one from the Los Angeles Times, one from the soon-to-become defunct Soho News. The letters said, in effect, “If you write something good we will consider publishing it.” Somehow, that was enough. Goes to show the importance of both timing and impertinence.

I have notes upon notes upon notes from those interviews. And just one entry for Mr. C.P. Barrister, the man of this story. An alias. His last name was something else, but as it was a profession, this will do. Apparently the British had given his Gujarati grandfather an English name, using his job. Importing the model that gave us Smith, Threadwell, and Cook.

In any case, I took a sightseeing tour.

A group of us queued up for the bus. I overheard my seatmate, a man who looked to be in his late 30s, talking to some older women across the aisle. He was accompanying his aunt and his mother on the tour. He asked me what work I did. This was perhaps the first time a man in India recognized that I might have work. He did not seem concerned with my age, my marital status, or the cost of my shoes. I had, by then, spent an entire month in the country and I was both devastatingly lonely and nearly numb.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I missed Western sensibilities. I missed irony, humor, banter, and awareness of psychological import. Mr. Barrister had it all. He wore a Western suit. And the bus was air-conditioned, after all.

We saw temples. We saw temples, and temples, and temples. Worshipers bathed, we did not. The day was excruciatingly hot. When, as we returned, Mr. Barrister asked for my phone number, and whether I’d be willing to go to dinner with him, I said yes.

During our hours on the bus, he had explained to me that he was not yet married because he had not yet made his fortune. That he took care of his mother. I did not worry. I wonder how it is I thought I knew anything at all. But Mr. Barrister was not the problem.

He picked me up in his car, and took me to a restaurant at the top of a Madras hotel. We ate gulab jamun, with flecks of gold leaf. He told me gold was good for my health. Superstitious nonsense, I thought, but I ate off a decorated plate, on a white tablecloth, in air-conditioning. I was comforted by that which would have seemed very foreign 6 weeks ago. I told him about my experiences so far, the Indian Airlines man whose goal was to kiss a foreign girl. Probably I told him about all the harassment but I don’t remember.

He asked would I like to take a drive, down by the sea. I wrote in my journal afterwards,

It was like we were twelve or fourteen, he gets me to drive his car. It was probably the best way he could think of to get to sit closer… Finally we changed places, and as it was getting late, got ready to go home. He turned on the key, which lit the red lightening bolt generator symbol. As the clutch engaged he said, ” I feel like that boy who said his ambition was to kiss a foreign girl.” I smiled and said, “You can kiss me if you want.”

So he did. We were parked by the side of the road, along the beach. I wrote,

He said finally, “I didn’t expect you to be so friendly. I thought you’d be more formal.” I was so touched.

Now I understand what he meant. Then, of course, I had no idea of the codes I was breaking. To me it felt as though finally things were working the way I expected them to.

I turned my whole body and put my arms around his neck and kissed him. We stayed like that. He pulled away abruptly and I opened my eyes. There in the window was a face like a ghoul, deep-eyed and wrapped in a white sheet. Mr. Barrister pushed at him and I began to scream.

Mr. Barrister started the car. I kept screaming, curled up on the seat of the car. The face disappeared. I screamed. Then I heard the door on my side open. I looked around to see the ghoul opening my door. His mouth hung open and I could see his tongue.

I stopped screaming and pulled the door shut. Mr. Barrister started the car and pulled away, leaving the ghoul behind.

Of course it was not a ghoul. It was one of India’s very poor, attracted by my jewelry but too weak to steal it. One simply could not kiss, by the roadside, in India then. It may be possible now. I do not know.

Mr. Barrister took me back to my hotel. He felt badly that he had not punched the would-be thief in the face. I wrote,

Mostly I felt badly about screaming. Big, strong, independent, world traveler, confronted by a dark and silent scrawny creature, reduced to screaming like women always scream.

*

I regret I called the man a ghoul. I regret I called the man a creature. I regret my references to his skin color but these were my reactions, 29 years ago, and I do not have the luxury here of inventing myself to be better than I was. When we are attacked, we define our attacker as other, as not-human.

I regret that I felt scorn for screaming women. It is important to note that I have never been so scared in my life, not before, not since. I can still remember that face coming through the car window, the dark of an Indian seaside night behind him. The gray cloth wrapped round his head. In fact, I was probably in very little danger. The poor man was so weak even I could pull the door shut against his efforts.

This is the good part of aging, to understand what one has learned, and to see what one has invented, in time. Despite my fear and ignorance, I was a kind-hearted young woman doing the best she could in a very strange place.

I was right about one thing. Mr. Barrister was a good man. He treated me like a person. Anything he wanted from me, he requested. He thanked me graciously for anything I gave.

I was wrong about so much else. When you are young, you experience your life as though you sit at the center. You believe that what happens to you, happens because of you. You build meaning from the blocks of personal experience, from the inside out. You have not, or at least I had not, developed multiple eyes and lines of sight.

Later that week, Mr. Barrister took me to the beach. There was not a soul in sight, not even my own. It was hot, and the sand so powdery as to feel like dust. Palm trees offer little shade. I hope, wherever he is, that he has found a wife. Perhaps he has some children. I kept on traveling.

Images: Me, on Kodak slide film. The bits of detritus are authentic.

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I know.

Her new show opens in Delhi this Friday. She is exhibiting along with three other American artists, Carrie Fonder, Rebecca Layton and Jenny Mullins. Here are two of the new pieces.

Agreed, her work is pretty. Pretty but at the same time, somehow, sad about happiness and bravely waving at meaning. Often the meaning of archetypal structures.

I never really understand how art works, or how to talk about it. But I see that Lily’s latest work has grown more conceptual, more political, and thereby just that little bit less pretty. Or, to put it more precisely, this pretty takes a sharper edge. I find the juxtaposition of coral, salmon, and the bullet shape of silos against the outline of Mughal arches, to be quite brilliant.

No fools they, the Times of India did a feature on the show, which you can read here.

Much of Lily’s previous work, seen in her portfolio, here, has sold. Unsurprisingly. But a few pieces remain. A few gorgeous pieces. She has, it appears, often painted structures. This, from her Westward Ho series, comprised of small to mid-sized oils of houses – in the midst of Western space and light.

This, from the series called Mojave.

And finally, this, from Weed Eaters. Lily can write, too. Here’s the backstory to the horse.

These images are quite possessing me, for the moment. I do not know when I will shake them.

This post, I wanted to note, followed more closely than usual upon the similar post about Brigitte Carnochan. That’s purely accidental. I may not discover another artist who sets my sensibilities a-tingle for months. I’m picky. Art’s hard, and personal. That said, now is a good time to remind you that until March 31, Gitta’s donating 25% of the proceeds from her photo sales at Verve Gallery to  Save The Children’s Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Fund.

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I left the Buddhist stupas and Austrian tourists of Sanchi behind. At the railroad station I threw myself and my blue duffle into the Fate Choose Please lottery. Knowing that Shashi Kapoor was filming Heat and Dust in Hyderabad, I decided that if a seat were available on the next train in that direction, I’d go.

I went.

We changed trains in Bhopal, which would become, 21 months later, the site of the worst industrial accident in history. When I think back to passing through, for I do remember the town, I cannot locate the source of significance. It’s like reading the book of your life, only to find a passage that seemed trivial is now highlighted. To what purpose you do not know.

I arrived in Hyderabad, and took a cab to the Hotel Banjara.

It still exists, today, as the Taj Banjara. Although I did not know where the film crew was staying, the only luxury hotel in town seemed a good guess. My resourcefulness was growing. Sure enough, as I wandered out to the swimming pool, I saw Shashi and Ms. Julie Christie, his co-star, sitting at a table. Shashi’s wife was there; also what we might now term an entourage.

I left a message at the desk for Mr. Kapoor. Sensing, somehow, that I shouldn’t just walk up to him and say hello in this context, or, heaven forbid, take his picture. And then I waited. I ate at the coffee shop. I looked out at the hotel lake where women washed their clothes in water that I could smell from the patio. This worried me.

I watched TV, which felt so odd I seem to have taken a picture of the television. I went to bed.

I woke up. Still no reply, no invitation to join the glamorous crowd of film people drinking by the pool. But Hyderabad was known for something other than movie stars – it’s the pearl-stringing capital of India. Somehow I managed to talk myself out of hiding miserably in my room and into hiring a cab to take me sightseeing. To take me pearl buying. When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, if Shakepeare had been a 25-year old High WASP adventuring through India, I do believe he too would have gone looking for a 3-strand pearl bracelet.

Oh I was so lonely. And so determined.

I remember the pearl shop. The vendor made me drink tea. Sweet tea, out of little cups. He assured me the pearls were Mikimoto, and promised, as I wrote in my journal, “In addition we have much flexibility in making things to order. We will deliver even on Sunday.”

I was not alone in the shop. Two men from Atlanta, named John and Milton, were buying too. One of them a necklace and earrings for his wife, and, as he told me, a pair of bangles and matching necklace for his girlfriend. I thought he was kidding at first. He seemed too staid to have a girlfriend. I wrote,

Mr. John T. said he’d like to bring me some fruit. Then he told me of how he and Milton arrived in Hyderabad, and how they saw “the temple floating in the sky with the planets all in a line above.” And then he said, “Can you you imagine Milton!” as though I should have reason to ever consider imagining Milton at all.

Clearly I gathered my ostensible sophistication around me like armor. Maybe even my social class. I was young. I am sorry. You can’t know your silent bias, and you don’t usually say things – out loud – that you know are really wrong. Then when you finally hear yourself, as I do now, you feel embarrassed but truthful. If I am more forgiving of my young self, it’s possible that I was trying to fight off my distress at Milton’s bad behavior towards his wife. I don’t know.

I took my cab back to the Hotel Banjara. In reading my journal, I can see that my carefully constructed self was starting to fray, even crack. I was never in danger of a full breakdown. Sturdy Gals don’t do that, our hard-wiring forbids. We put one foot in front of the next, wading through anxiety like mud. However, I had been in India for just over a month, mostly alone, and that’s a long time. Fragments of English songs had begun to play themselves, unasked, in the back of my mind.

I believe at this point I finally began to meet the country.

Back at the hotel, I found no message still. I realized, belatedly, that perhaps Mr. Kapoor would not want to introduce me to Julie Christie. Perhaps he would not want to say to his wife, “Oh, yes dear, here is the personage I took to dinner at the marble mansion. With whom I sat on satin cushions.” Some things are very different in foreign cultures, some things are the same. I ordered dinner in my room, and sat, eating peanuts. I wondered if I should pack the ones I couldn’t finish into a bag and take them with me. I was proud of myself for surviving disappointment but wrote that I still couldn’t bring myself to do something that felt as middle-class as squirreling away peanuts. Much yet left to learn.

Downstairs, in the hotel restaurant, John and Milton ate their dinners. They had called me, asking if I’d join. “Um,” I said, “I may have plans.” I was growing more resourceful. Disdain or no disdain I didn’t have to eat dinner with men I didn’t like.

And, at the end of that day, as my original framework frayed, I saw only what I saw. With meaning or without it, Mr. Kapoor disdained me, John and Milton goggled at the planets’ alignment, I bought pearls that would crumble some decades later. I could only catalog the sights. I wrote,

Double-strand 5mm Mikimoto $85, necklace of graduated gray R2255 pearls and matching earstuds, approx $150, pearl and round polished garnet pair of bangles on silver and matching 16 in necklace, $100. Food; masala dosa in greasy, good cucumber & sambar chutneys, excellent lemon mulligatawny soup with croutons. Rich chicken curry which they asked if it was not too hot. Room service: Beer arrived with peanuts. Room: bathroom very clean, sterilized glasses, toilet, good drinking water. Ex-Nissan’s palace now Andra Pradesh HQ. River running through town, green and beautiful. Lake between Secunderabad and Hyderabad. Pleasant even in hot season. The temple at sunset: “Leave your coconuts here.”

There might not have been a toilet, you see.

For all I know, Milton was the Buddha. I have learned to mistrust disdain.

Images: me, except the picture of the Hotel Banjara from James Davidson here. Where there are more pictures of the “lake.”

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This photo is to prove, only, that I was dressed appropriately for the company picnic. Just by existing I broke other Indian cultural rules but never dress if I could help it.

And here’s what happened next.I missed the 7pm bus to Bhopal. When I got back to the hotel, I discovered that buses might not leave the next day either. A man, who was described as the son of a high priest, or an administrator, took me to the bus stand to inquire. Indeed, no buses were scheduled. He arranged for someone who was described as a traffic policeman to help me in an unspecified way the next day.

We went back to the hotel. I wrote,

“Sitting in the lobby, who do I find but my friend, Mr. K.K. Thali. He tells me that he was devastated to hear that no buses will go tomorrow morning, he has thought only of me, and he has come up with an alternative.”

I was to be driven to a town called something like, but not exactly, Brnisa, where I could catch a bus for Jhansi at midnight. However, there were tigers, so we had to be careful. I wrote,

“K.K. Thali rustles up a ‘conveyance’ belonging to the administrator of Khajuraho. Off we go, me, K.K. Thali, the administrator’s son, and the driver.”

The conveyance turned out to be a jeep with padded seats, red interior light, and an 8-track cassette deck. If I recall, they played the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever.

It was darker than ever outside. We drove to Brnisa. Mr. K.K. Thali attempted to squeeze me rather a lot. We stopped. We got out. They waited with me by the roadside. After all, there were tigers. At midnight precisely, a bus pulled up. On I got, goodbyes all around.

The conductor asked me if I wanted making the love, using a very recognizable hand gesture. ‘No thank you,’ I said. He smiled, and shook his head in the Indian nod. I slept. We arrived in Jhansi at 3am. I exited the bus, precipitously, leaving behind my red down vest. I took a tonga to the train station. I found my bunk, and lay down to sleep, wishing I still had my down vest to use as a pillow.

I was reassured by the presence of an elderly gentleman, sitting on the berth below me, reading. I dozed off. I wrote,

“I am awakened by said gentleman asking me a question. I don’t understand. I put my head down to sleep again. He caresses my head and I speak out in surprise. He shakes his head, as though I needn’t worry. I lie down once more to sleep. Slowly he reaches over and touches my face as though I were insubstantial, transparent. Very gently he rests his hand on my forehead, my cheeks, my shoulder, my head again. He scratches my head, as though I were a child. I think it must be a religious ritual until I feel him raise himself up on the lower berth. I open my eyes to see him bending down to kiss me. ‘Please, no,’ I say. He nods, and sits back down on the lower berth.

Really? Just how much was I supposed to put up with? Clearly, at 25, alone in India, I wasn’t sure.

When the train arrived in Sanchi, I hurried through the crowd of people getting off the train. I grabbed hold of three tall Austrian men and made them walk me to where I would be staying the night. I can make no excuse for my cultural bias. They looked familiar, and safe.

I always tell this series of events as a funny story.

The next morning I went to visit Sanchi’s Buddhist stupa. It’s old and massive. I woke up early and saw the sunrise on my way. I felt I’d been there in a previous life. The sky was blue and so bright I couldn’t quite open my eyes. Things that weren’t white appeared so anyway.

Then I walked through the town marketplace, where a man gladly sold me several inches of blue glass bangles. Bangle sellers have to squeeze your bones a certain way to get the things on. Pinky knuckle, thumb knuckle, wrist, wrist.


He held my hand and moved my bones just so. I wore the bangles until I had to break them off in business school. Too much jangle for note-taking.

Images:
me
They all expand when clicked

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