Rendezvous in Nagpur

In March 1996, I was preparing for seven weeks of research in India for a biography I was writing. Before leaving home, I hoped to get in touch with a retired physician living in New York City, a Dr. Charles Reynolds, who I’d been told could give me some important background and leads for my book. But although I phoned his home a dozen times over several days, he did not answer. "He must be away," I said to my son who was going to India with me. "Too bad he doesn’t have an answering machine." So, I had to fly off to India without interviewing Dr. Reynolds—a disappointment, but I would try again to reach him when I got back.

After 24 hours en route, our 747 landed in India’s, then, largest city, whose name had just changed from Bombay (what the British had always called it) to Mumbai (what local Marathi and Gujarati speakers had always called it). From Mumbai, we planned to travel by rail to Nagpur, a city of two million in the heart of India’s orange country. In 1896, Raghujiraje Bhonsletested—which is for me to spell and you to pronounce—tried growing oranges in his Nagpur kitchen garden. The trees flourished and today something like two million tons of oranges are harvested in those parts every year. It is not hard to see why Nagpur is known as the orange city, although its actual name means City of Snakes.

The journey from Mumbai to Nagpur is 500 miles. We decided to get second class sleeper tickets, which cost only seven dollars and offered a more adventurous trip. Some Indian friends reading this blog might think we were inviting a little too much adventure, for although we had assigned seat numbers, in that travel class a seat assignment doesn’t guarantee you the seat. You take the seat you can get. And for the eleven and a half hours it takes to get from Mumbai to Nagpur, you and your traveling companion must vigilantly guard it or you will certainly lose it. But if you want to meet and mix with ordinary Indians, and you have a strong chain and lock to secure your luggage under the seat, second class sleeper can be great fun.

On neither the train, nor on the way to our hotel, did we see any European (white) faces. Nagpur has tourists, but it is not a tourist city like Mumbai, Delhi, or Chennai—strange in a way because Nagpur is a beautiful metropolis that some say is the cleanest, greenest city in India. Moreover, it a warmly, welcoming place.

I suppose because we had seen no other white faces, we immediately noticed the man walking toward us when we entered the hotel lobby. We greeted him and were pleased to hear him respond in English, though with a lilt of Irish brogue.

"Tell me who you are and where you’re from," I said.

"Well," said the man, "my name is Charles Reynolds, and I am a retired physician living in New York City."

Once Upon a Time in Kerala

On our fortieth wedding anniversary, my wife and I became full-time tourists, which, we seldom are even though we travel often. The place we chose for our anniversary trip was Kerala, a state in southern India on the Malabar Coast. Kerala  is where tradition has it the Apostle Thomas brought the gospel to the Indian subcontinent in 53 A.D.

What attracted us to Kerala was the chance to meet favorite relatives of a good friend, visit the beautiful tea plantations of the Munnar Hills, take a boat ride around a jungle lake where wild animals from tigers to elephants come to quench their thirst, visit the town where the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed in 1498, hire a sixty-foot bamboo houseboat for plying the Kerala backwaters along the Arabian Sea—and to be able to do it all fairly inexpensively since we were already in the southern India for other purposes.

The memories of that anniversary trip are rich—seeing how farm folk harvest tea, fending off marauder monkeys set on stealing our lunch, watching fishermen mend their nets as their fathers and grandfathers no doubt did too, and making friends by sharing binoculars on that jungle lake. But it was our two-day houseboat adventure—a real-life voyage through a fairytale place—the enthralled us most. The reason, I think, is because most of us are curious about how other people live and how we are alike or differ. Our floating observation platform was thus a window, offering snapshots of a world that seemed, for the moment, more fascinating and appealing than Middle Earth, Narnia, and Wonderland combined. It was so, because it was a real place with real people, not fantasy fiction or a movie adventure. It was real life into which we were allowed the briefest of glimpses as we sailed along on our fairy tale adventure sans any chance of misadventures. They were only glimpses, but they were enough.

The houseboat included a crew of three: a driver, an engineer, and a cook named Augustine, whose delectable dishes included the banana-leaf banquet at the top of this blog. The bow of the boat was our tea room. It consisted of port and starboard built-in benches, a TV in which we had not the slightest interest, and a round dining table. Behind the bow was a set of stairs to an upper-level room in which we could relax and read or, as we preferred, be mesmerized by the enchanted water's-edge villages we floated by so closely. There were fathers milking cows, mothers washing clothes, children going to school, and littler children waving and, when we waved back, giggling. Sternward, on the main deck, was our bedroom. It even had AC, but we spent as little time there as possible. There was too much to see and hear, too many aromas to breathe in, and too little time for our senses to absorb it all.

As daylight faded and the crew secured our boat to shoreline trees, I began jotting down the sights and sounds of twilight to dawn:
 

·        Dusk—ghost birds alighting in a cinnamon tree; fireflies emulating the real stars (cf. Robert Frost); a concert of frogs peeping, and insects droning; torches moving swiftly along rice paddy paths;

 

·        Late night---umbrella fronds dissipating the full moon’s light, but not its sway;  glistening ripples; swinging and swaying in the wake of a passing boat;

 

·        Dawn—palms bending to kiss their watery kin (reflections); silent boats of fishermen gliding by; water taxis full of folk off to work; the smell of breakfast from the galley at our stern.

It’s now been two years since our backwater journey. I’m still taking it in.

 

Where There's a Whim

When we were young, my wife and I felt fortunate to pay the rent, let alone have appliances like a clothes washer and dryer. So we went each week to the local laundromat. Had we not been poor, we could have gone next door to a department store restaurant for coffee and conversation while we were waiting, but the conversation had to suffice. I should add, we did occasionally manage to out to eat—most often at a nearby Howard Johnson’s that gave you an egg, toast, and coffee for sixty-something cents. Once, we managed it by fishing under our couch cushions for the last few cents.

Our visits to the laundromat were, for me, the most boring, least satisfying events of the week. Though the place was hot, it left me cold. I could find no pleasure from the humdrum of clothes going round and round and the snapping of shirt buttons against metal cylinders. And since everybody to listened to everybody, our conversations were reduced to “Dear, do you have another dime?” Or “Honey, will you please get more change from the change machine?” At first I brought reading material, but the distractions—machine doors closing, people pushing baskets and folding clothes, portable radios and boom boxes, and a babel of conversations—made it impossible to concentrate on the textbooks I was then having to reading. So, I took to reading the newspapers and magazines lying around instead.

“I need another diversion,” I told my wife one day, and when I opened a magazine, I got an idea. The magazine contained quality articles, reviews, cartoons, and poetry. “While our clothes are washing today, I will write,” I told my wife.” And I did. I wrote a poem. And when I got home, I sent it off to that same magazine.

I nearly forgot about it, but a few weeks later, an envelope came from the publisher of the magazine, and in it was a check for a hundred dollars, which was most of a week’s pay. It covered our laundromat and coffee bills next door for several months.

I went to the journals section of a local library recently, and searched through the 1974 issues for my poem, and there it was. And after almost forty years, it was still familiar. I wondered what I was thinking that day in the laundromat when I decided my path out of boredom was to write. In retrospect, it seems a mere caprice. But it worked. As the saying goes, “Where there’s a whim, there’s a way.”

The Poinsettia Solution

 

So, here we are in January, and I am writing about poinsettias. But why? Aren't we past Christmas? Well, yes and no.

To most, I think, the term Christmastide is simply a synonym for the Christmas season. But in some Christian traditions, it has a more specific meaning. Have you heard the song, The Twelve Days of Christmas and wondered, what and when those days of Christmas are? It is referring to the twelve days that follow Christmas Day, also known as Twelvetide or Christmastide. The culmination of those days is the church's festival of Epiphany, which memorializes the arrival of the Wise Men at Bethlehem with their gifts for Jesus. I raise this because the night on which I am writing these words is January 5, the twelfth night after Christmas, and it brings to mind a crisis that occurred in our family on an Epiphany Sunday a couple of decades ago, and that was only solved by an epiphany of our own we now call, "the "poinsettia solution."

It all began sometime in the early 1990s when my wife came across an article about a family that gave secret gifts over Christmastide. When she told me and our teenage son about it, we got excited about adopting the idea ourselves. And, for several years, we did. The second or third year, we selected a single father and his two daughters. For twelve nights, we left anonymous gifts at their doorstep—not expensive ones but such things as a scented candle, a miniature manger scene, home baked cookies, and, one Saturday night, a poinsettia.

Here is how it worked. Just after dark, my wife, and son, and I would drive to the house of the family, and my son would go to the front door, quickly place the wrapped gift on the stoop, and ring the doorbell. Then, he would race to the car, and off we would go before anyone could spot us. So that we would remain anonymous—which was essential to the fun—we varied the delivery times and, after a few days, we parked farther away so our car would not be seen and recognized. In our minds, remaining undetected was almost as important as blessing the family.

As I look back, it seems remarkable we were not caught, but we never were. However, that does not mean we were never suspected. And this particular Christmastide, we were. At church the next day, in a room next to one I happened to be in, I overheard the father talking about the mysterious gifts and the poinsettia they had found the night before. "Who do you suppose is behind it?" he was asked. I was shocked when he replied he strongly suspected us!

I have no idea why he thought it was us—there were plenty of other likely suspects—but what a panic that threw us into! What if the father came right out and asked if we were the ones? Being found out like that would be tantamount to a barefoot Hobbit being detected on a some secret errand. What family pride would be lost if we were identified! Moreover, exposure would be sure to bring the public embarrassment that is intrinsic to such revelations: some might call us Christmas philanthropists; others, though, might label us as attention getters. Horrors! But that wasn't the worst thing. Worst of all, we could never do it again. The game would be up. People would know immediately who the secret givers were. Seldom had our family faced such a crisis.

We decided we needed a strategy for shifting the father's suspicion in a new direction. That is when we came up with our epiphany: the poinsettia solution! Later that afternoon, we paid the family a visit, as we sometimes did. We rang the front doorbell, but this time we did not run away. And when they came to the door, we presented them with another poinsettia! "We thought you would enjoy a little Christmas gift," we said to them. As we handed them the plant, they glanced at each other with a dumbfounded look. We could literally see their theory evaporate on their faces. From that moment on, they suspected anybody—except us—of being the mysterious givers.