The Barber's Daughter - Chapter One

My Lord Krishna died last month and I feel nothing. It's been years since I've seen him whenever Orion owned the sky, years since my innocence orbited in daily thought around his gentle grace and kindness, years even since his last epistle well into his second marriage.

We met in 1957 in a fantastical world where each day five thousand years of history collide in the colors and the heat and the filth of a karmic land whose milling masses live out their lives in unquestioning acceptance of the casual cruelty of their gods. He was a rising star in the old boy network which ruled the Foreign Service and I, I was running away from the claustrophobic confines of my birth.

I had gone to New York to see my friend Joan right after exams in May of 1956. At my Father's behest, I then was at Buffalo State ostensibly studying elementary education. I had first gone to Syracuse for its journalism school before retreating back to Buffalo and the American Studies program at UB because it would save the cost of housing. Daddy no longer permitted Mother to neglect him by going off to work for so paltry a reason as tuition for her daughter. No she was not always going to get to put the kids first. Besides which he needed her to bring him his drinks and to sweep up in the barber shop when he got too busy to look after things himself.

Even when the Dean of Students tried to motivate me by telling me that my percentiles were off the scale, I made no effort to excel. I didn't want to teach and wind up to be the old maid my Mother said I'd turn into whenever I displayed a bit of temper just like my Aunt Vicky. No, the young Tatiana hidden in my Slavic breast awaited her Onegin not the safety of a school marm's life.

One morning after Joan and her roommate Dot and I had roared around Manhattan in the middle of the night to catch a few breezes off the rivers and count the ships in port, an ad announcing staff openings in the U.S. Foreign Service appeared in the New York Times. I went for an interviews but in my shyness did not presume to apply. The State Department sent two letters to North Tonawanda inviting me to join and by the end of October I was ensconced with other new recruits at the Meridian Hill Hotel on Sixteenth Street in northwest Washington. So casually was my future formed.

Nine months would pass before I sailed away, a gentle gestation among my fellow novices to prepare me for the world abroad. Or did the security clearance process take so long because, as rumor had it, the Department needed new recruits to do the most mindless of the chores in Foggy Bottom?

Whatever. I had become the typist which my Father considered an appropriate aspiration for the little girl whose grades he had bragged about since she first made straight E's in grade school. It was, of course, a step up from the mills where his sisters labored. Whatever you do, make sure you do it to the best of your ability had been his frequent admonition. No one in the State Department's communication center ever matched my daily quotas. Thus I became a favorite of Elsie Crim at whose pleasure code clerks both old and new were shuffled around the globe. Miss Crim herself seemed permanently rooted to a rolling chair which barely contained her soft southern amplitude.

"Delphine, I can send you to Paris or to Rome if you insist. I know you young ones all join to go to Europe. But you'll resign within six months because you won't have enough money to live on and do the things one goes to Europe to explore. Let me send you to India where there's staff housing and a hardship allowance to supplement your salary. You'll be welcomed with open arms and you'll save a bundle."

My painful shyness did not desert me and once more I deferred to those who spoke more loudly.

My first night in Asia was spent in Karachi. The Panam prop put down into an ocean of brown dust, destroying in its descent the blood red sun which exploded over the sands of the Rajastani
desert in the early dusk. The Afghani government officials with whom I had shared the flight from Rome hurriedly consumed the last of their whiskeys as they readjusted their mantles of Muslim morality. Before we were allowed to deplane, Pakistani health officers came on board and sprayed us, the clean and healthy foreigners. some of whom were about to look upon the face of famine and disease for the very first time. Surely I had tumbled into wonderland.

The airport personnel were solicitous. They offered me the very best of the rooms at the adjacent motel. This meant a long, long walk in bone-colored pointed heels in order to reach the only air-conditioned wing. An American ambassador on his way to a new post in Asia had warned me about those shoes when he and his wife had included me in their limousine ride from the dock of the USS Constitution in Naples to my hotel on the Piazza Navonna in Rome. Henry Byroade's concern, however, had not been my comfort but rather the signal those shoes sent to the ever hopeful gentlemen of the Eternal City.

The favor I was shown seemed rare indeed as the porter brushed aside a hundred little lizards before he opened the door to a stale and sour room. Inside the startling incandescence of a single bulk suspended without cover from the middle of the ceiling caused a scurrying of a seemingly limitless number of the miniature reptiles. For someone who had grown up in upstate New York here only the occasional fly and a few mosquitoes marred the perfect of a summer day the shock of sharing an already outlandish place with such a primordial multitude was overwhelming. I pulled the wrought iron bed and its meager mattress into the center of the room and like the Buddha I sat cross legged under the blazing bulk until the dawn.

George Mitchell spoke to me again, George the Catholic convert whose passion for God and for me and for all things French had begun to color the greyness of my life. George, who had bestowed upon me my first kiss since a little boy in the second grade leaned over me while passing out papers, mourned my departure into absence and into existential error.

I feared anew the elephantiasis with which some living in the subcontinent were afflicted. Those photographs of people horrendously deformed with pumpkins on their necks compelled attention to the fact that I still could not swallow vitamins or any other pills. The virulence of my reaction to the tetanus.typhoid shot had forced me to look into death'd door if only for one feverish night.

In the morning Barbara Blodgett with whom I'd worked in Washington came out to give me a taxi tour of downtown Karachi. Her sweet disposition did little to dispel the foreboding occasioned by the heavy brown which overlay everything but the garments of the figures who floated through the heat and dust. Months later I would hear that Barbara had disappeared into the proscriptive world of a Pakistani wife.

The afternoon flight to Delhi arrived at dusk. My new co-workers were waiting in a ramshackle building at the end of a single runway which formed the in town airport. Inchoate monsters on a nearby temple seemed to wrestle for the sovereignty of the night. The heat was gelatinous even in the absence of Surya, the Hindu sun god.

Gerry Mull, the code room supervisor, and his colleagues Barbara Smith and Mary Farley welcome me to my first overseas post. Gerry was from Ypsilanti and because of him I would come the learn the meaning of the word uxorious. Barbara, crisp and dark-haired, told me of a bearer named Khalum who was immediately available. "He's the best in the compound and you'd better act quickly if you want him." she said.

A full time servant to look after just me! The barber's daughter could hardly see the need.

"And you'll also need a dhobi and a sweeper. Khalum will cook and shop and clean everything but the floors. The dhobi washed clothes for half a dozen people and the sweeper does the floors and takes away the trash. This is India, you know. Everything is different."

They drove me through the strangeness to the Janpath Hotel and said an embassy car would come for me at eight the next morning.

I thanked them in the great heat and moved into a modern hotel of less than luxe pretensions. Once in my room I sat freezing on the edge of a narrow white bed while I tried to figure out how many months I'd have to work before I'd have enough money for my airfare home. New government employees are not eligible for return at taxpayer expense until they've completed two years abroad.

Two years to a twenty two year old stretch beyond belief but to my baby brother Ricky who then was twelve, I now know that that hiatus meant abandonment. The light of my life and the focus of our family's fitful joys had come to New York with our Father to see me off as I sailed away to my first adventures beyond the sea. Ricky had become almost more my child than my Mother's not through any dereliction on her part but simply because even at the age of nine my passion, stirred by Dostoevsky and his peers, required a great love, and all others in my life were wanting.

I had to run away, away from Daddy who stood with self-conscious importance on the dock below, away from his constant yelling, his constant need to be so right. I couldn't make him understand that his rightness was not my own although I didn't know just what my own might be. Manhattan disappeared as I stood on deck smoking my first Dunhills, the elegant wine and gold package a goodbye gist from my precious Rick. I don't recall that my other brother even crossed my mind.

In July of 1957 Edward Stone's world famous confection in the new diplomatic enclave on the outskirts of New Delhihad not yet been completed. So I reported to a sprawling old yellow estate in town which then served as the U.S. Embassy in India. Within half an hour a human perpetual motion machine named Lee Rose had briefed me on all office procedures and every variant which could possibly occur during the course of an entire assignment. Lee went on to caution me that each contact point on the rotors had to be polished by hand with chamois. "Don't cheat with a pencil eraser. The residue will clog the machines and John Smith, the regional tech, will have your head. It's the only thing he really gets upset about."

Actually John was as sweet and helpful as was Lee. I never had to polish a single rotos or even change a ribbon because John would do so for hours on end when he wasn't out of town servicing another post.

We used rackety code machines with one time tap[e systems to communicate with Washington and most of the rest of the world, but messages to the consulates in India and to Kathmandu were laboriously encrypted with substitution pads.

The United States did not yet have a formal diplomatic representation in the capital of Nepal and it remained the mysterious magical world of mountains and our dreams of Shangri-la. The Beatles had not yet sung their songs and the flower children were not yet to worship in the shadows of the Himalayan snow gods.

The political officer in charge of U.S. Nepalese affairs was a pleasant man whose nondescript office abutted the file room on the second floor through which we had to pass in order to enter the code room. Doug couldn't have been more cordial and he graciously allowed me to use his office when George would call from Washington to importune my return. Standing at his desk as the waves of sound faltered back and forth, I wondered f he detected the falsies with which I then enhanced my still adolescent figure.

L. Douglas Heck had literally been born into the Foreign Service. As son of the U.S. Consul General in Istanbul, he grew up in a world of courtesies and ease and intellectual stimulation unknown to the daughter of a first generation Polish-American whose immigrant family had been too poor to pay his passage into the priesthood. Elizabeth, Doug's wife, was a tall and serious woman, a Swarthmore grad, who seemed to spend much time up in Simla, one of the hill stations north of Delhi to which first the British and now anyone well-to-do enough retreated during the great heat.

I first met the Hecks two days after my arrival at the Fourth of July part hosted by the Marine guards for the entire American community. The big bash was held at the Taj, home to the Marines and to almost all non-diplomatic employees. Unlike the seventeenth century tomb, the Taj consisted of some 50 or 60 single units constructed during the second world war to quarter American military officers.

Scotch and waters flowed as freely as the fountains in the city circles. Among the heavy imbibers was Miss Boo, a happy golden retriever, whose previous owner had abandoned her to the exotic ministrations of the militantly masculine young Marines. "Here pretty lady" called one of our hosts, putting down a saucer of mi;lk and whiskey. As someone whose family maintained an array of bottles mainly for display at Christmas and at Easter, I was appalled. But in my thirst, I too downed many a glass with no discernible difference in my behavior or so I thought.

While the uncommitted bachelors circled tentatively, Miss Boo provided more agreeable company. Soon after I moved into my own unit, I made her mine. Lady as I preferred to call her quickly became one of the two great new loves of my singularly sheltered life.