The Barber's Daughter - Chapter Three

As dawn came up, fair to the north we saw the fiery lips of morning kissing snow gods of stupendous size. The earth itself seemed to do obeisance to their supra worldly splendor as the plains lay prostrate before the majesty of the still growing giants which are the Himalayas.

I was aboard the military attache's plane, en route to Calcutta where the Deputy Chief of Mission, Winthrop Brown, had an appointment early that February morning. As was customary, he had invited some staff members to share the pre-dawn flight, among them Pat Billson, cheerful, practical Pat who made each passage through the file room a delight. We'd be seeing Jane Kiernan, another of the code clerks with whom I'd worked in Washington. She now was at the Consulate General in Calcutta living in quarters too small to accommodate any guests. She too had moved from Meridian Hill to the YWCA near 17th and K, a possible walk bak and forth to State when we weren't too pressed for time. But whereas my life outside te Department was mainly George, hers was Lois, her very beautiful friend from Boston who only wore one suit, but what a suit. A stunning black brown tweed which reflected the soft elegance of one to the manor born.

Incredibly it was cold, so cold that February morning, that I wore a handsome light grey tweed coat I'd bought at Peck & Peck, the coat in which George had photographed me by the P Street bridge in Georgetown. I guess George really did love me because I looked so beautiful in those snapshots. Quite a contrast to those my Mother took, her forefinger always obliterating a corner of the scene and me always glaring, awkward and angry.

Soon the DC 3 started its descent as the Hooghly River, the westernmost channel of the Ganges snaked through its delta toward the Sea of Bengal. We spiralled down over a maze of makeshift buildings and boats riding a river of mud. Dispersed among them were fragile settlements in which hundreds of thousands of human beings clung to lives so tenuous that a few feet rise in the tide could easily obliterate all evidence of their being. But when the waters receded they or their descendants returned again and again like abused children who prefer the known violence of out-of-control parents to the ministrations of caregivers who rule their lives with colder cruelty.

The door of the plane opened and the heat which entered was as palpable as childbirth. It almost blew us back into the cabin.

We rove into town from DumDum, the airport named for the nearby arsenal which had produced the infamous bullets used by the British to put down dissent among the natives. It became evident that all of Bengal gave new meaning to the word teeming. Wave upon wave of milling humanity melted before the onrushing limousine as we raced through a maelstrom of moving creatures.

Mr. brown dropped us at the Great Eastern Hotel where Jane was waiting to take us on a tour with the local representative for CARE. Bob Kelly replicated Jane's tall, black-haired good looks and his sardonic intelligence matched her Boston Irish wit.

"It's hard to pick the worst of the worst in this hell hole but the railroad stations are as god a bet as any," Bob said, as he maneuvered his Landrover through the streets which millions had the misfortune to call home.

We arrived at Howrah where some five thousand refugees lived in cardboard boxes or corrugated cans awaiting a respite from the age old Hindu/Muslim animosities so that they could return home. Too poor for the blouse-like choli, modesty also was too precious a commodity for their women who scratched the scorching streets for a few dropped grains of rice or an abandoned object which might bring a rupee from some other indigent. Bereft of home and of homeland, they took no notice when their saris fell from ther shoulders. The eyes of strangers had no meaning.

Bob was not as pitying as Pat and I. "These people persist n the Muslim/Hindu hatreds. We/ve resettled hundreds of thousands of the estimated five million refugees who've come to West Bengal since partition but they resist any change even if it means survival. They're so inflexible that if they come from a wheat- eating area, they absolutely refuse to live in a rice-growing region. And if they are sent to a wheat-growing area, the variety must be exactly the same as that to which they are accustomed. Otherwise, they still won't eat."

I remembered that Doug had told me that Americans had earned much opproprium when some years earlier tons and tons of wheat shipped in response to famine proved unacceptable. The villagers though they were being poisoned, a fear perhaps fanned by clever communists concentrated among the unemployed intelligentsia in Bengal.

Bob next drove us to Sealdah, a station slightly smaller in size but so overwhelming in misery that the Government of West Bengal refused to allow the Prime Minister to see it during an official visit. We concluded the afternoon with a visit to the Kali Ghat, the place where the dead are burned to the extent that their relatives can afford sufficient wood. Although a local guide said we could take pictures, we chose not to insult the wretched any further.

Numbed by our afternoon excursion, we sank into catatonia on the drive back to the hotel. I thought of Doug and our after hour chats in the embassy during which he caressed the solitude of my soul with his cheerful civility and encyclopedic knowledge of the subcontinent. But mainly he spoke of a beautiful land lost in time.

"Once you go to Nepal, you'll never be the same. There is a magic in the air. The higher you climb into the hills, the nicer the people become. Perhaps it's because the heat no longer is so intense that life is somewhat easier. Water is more accessible and crops grow more easily than they do in the burning plains to the south." He promised to take me as soon as he could.

That promise was to be fulfilled sooner than I expected...

When Bob and Jane dropped us at the Great Eastern, there was a message for me. Doug Heck would call again at 7 p.m. It was now quarter to. Pat and I raced up to our room and tore off our clothes, sopping as we were from our whirlwind excursion through the inferno outside.

"think you can break away to join a convoy taking jeeps to Kathmandu? I'm flying in tomorrow with Marilyn, my secretary, and we're leaving the following morning with several folks from the consulate to make the delivery. Ask Pat and Jane to come along. Believe me, the more the merrier and you'll have the adventure of a lifetime."

I called Gerry Mull to arrange additional leave but Pat and Jane demurred. "Gee, Delphine, I'd love to tag along. But Miriam is going on leave next Monday and I have to be back or the whole embassy will fall apart. You know no one else can find anything in that file room."



Proper Patricia, good Catholic Pat, never said don't go off with a married man. No everyone assumed that I knew what I was doing as they'd done for as long as I remembered.

Five jeeps were packed with food and water and luggage when ten American officials assembled at the Consulate General in the pre-dawn coolness. We drove out past vestiges of decaying empire and through streets of still shrouded bodies not yet resurrected from their sleepless night. The ceaseless cacophony of Calcutta followed us past beggar colonies and sprawls of vendows setting out their modest wares.

As morning rose, we continued north through suburbs somewhat more sedate than the never ending whirlwind within the inner city. After an hour or so, we turned west toward the industrial belt which rings the city. Here factories and mills spewed mountains of soot, magnifying the misery of the oppressive heat. Doug wet a cloth and wrapped it round his face as much to breathe as to catch the rivulets of sweat cascading down his body.

We alled the jeep the green gari and I drove despite the fact that non-diplomatic personnel were not encouraged to do so. The Hindu might twist and break the tail of his bullock a thousand times and prod its genitals raw but woe to any foreigner who even grazed its flank. Americans were officially advised to flee if an accident occurred and report isntead to the nearest police station rather than risk a lynching right then and there.

The first night out we stopped at a government rest house, one of the many built throughout India during the Raj so that government officials had some place to stay as they travelled in the hinterlands. The one room hut was spare and sturdy and clean but we all preferred to put the charpoys outside in order to catch any wayward breezes. Doug held me on his lap for a few moments while we considered the spectacular stardust strewn across the sky. No westerner who's not travelled o smogless, smokeless spaces of underdeveloped areas of the world can claim o have ever seen the infinity which is the Milky Way. In the pre-dawn a bird landed on my sheet wrapped body. I was too terrified to uncover myself to see if a vulture thought my moribund.

After an austere breakfast of tea and bisquits we continued west through the scorching plains of Bihar until we came to a river crossing somewhat east of Patna. We were to be ferried across the Jumna in little craft of matchstick construction whose seaworthiness suggested toys in a bathtub. Doug and I were the last to place our jeep and our lives in the hands of four smiling boatmen who propelled our vessel across the clay colored river. Midway across Doug gave me a scarf of heavy Italian silk with muted colors, cream and grey and beige, in honor of my first crossing of the holy water. "It's so you'll never forget this trip," he said softly, kissing me lightly on the forehead.

On the other shore we soon found the new road which led to Kathmandu. For hours the only rest stops were leafless trees in fields of umber with an occasional camel to break to monotony. After a time the earth grew kinder. The villages were kissed with green and their wealh measured in heaps of dung. Each locality seemed to have devised a pattern of its own, much like the brands on cattle in the great American west. I was astonished to see girls of the most beautiful mien and carriage follow after the bullocks to catch their droppings.

Doug laughed at my distaste. "Not only do the Indian woman use the dung as an antiseptic against wounds a d as a cleaning agent in their huts, they also drink the bullock's urine to ensure their fertility."

The ground grew higher and the fields more lush as we continued north. We had fallen behind schedule and the other jeeps were nowhere to be seen. But Doug didn't see any problem in not reaching Kathmandu that evening. "There an AID couple living in the Rapti Valley. We'll spend the night with them."

The Rapti ran through a belt of land in southern Nepal known as the Teria. The US government had done much to banish malaria in the area but it remained a place where elephants rescued mechanical road builders and maharajas assembled for tiger hunts. The valley felt as new as it must have on the first day of creation. I asked Doug if I were among the very first white women to enter. He smiled and said perhaps among the first hundred.

The Wrights were pleased to see us and they produced a fine meal out of their modest quarters. They only westerners living in the Rapti, they obviously enjoyed Doug's company and the three had many tales to tell of the exigencies of attempting to work with people to whom the fifteenth century was more real than the twentieth.

They told us that now that the road from India was completed, the King was anxious to further extend his transportation network farther south in order to decrease Nepal's vulnerability against the great colossus which had swallowed Tibet with scarcely a protest from the western world. Thus did a medieval monarchy in Shangri-la find it prudent to seek protection from the world's largest democracy as well as from the world's most powerful. And that why Doug came to have the joy of establishing the first American embassy in Kathmandu.

As the green gari headed north out of the valley the next morning the hills grew into mountains with terraced landscapes making their mark upon the great glories of God's creation. The manicured villages in the Alps were not as close to heaven as were these hovels clinging to the youngest of God's mountains. Nor could the dour Swiss compare to the shing faces to be seen along the roadside near these magical aeries.

Thew air darkened and the road continued to curve upward. Solitary figures occasionally appeared, the women who worked only in their long heavy skirts, men who sat lacing the split calluses on the sole of their feet. Doug said that only western mountaineers required special boots . Their Sherpa guides wore none until they reached the intense cold at 20,000 feet.

Finally the valley of Kathmandu appeared. We pulled to the side of the road and walked across a treeless meadow to the edge of a precipice overlooking its vast expanse. The play of sunlight and shadow upon the scene was consummate manifestation of yin and yang, black and white, good and evil - all the duality in nature. We lay together in the grass until Doug discovered the fragility of the overhang.

As we began our descent, minarets and castles, maidans and prayer flags were everywhere in a fairyland of Elizabethan wooden structures. The hills were brilliant with the colors of Cezanne but the high mountains hid themselves behind foreboding clouds.

The all-knowing eyes of Swayumbonath, a striking Buddhist temple, stared everywhere across the valley.

#################