The Barber's Daughter - Chapter Two

"Where on earth did you get the idea that Delhi is not turning out well? Nothing could be further from the truth! I'm invited to dinners and parties and gatherings of all kinds and I'm even learning to ride."

So I wrote in exasperation to my Mother some six weeks after my arrival. I knew Daddy was behind the words in her letter. He wanted me back, back from college, back from the Foreign Service, back under his Old Testament thumb. He wouldn't let her use the money I had started sending so that Ricky could go to Canisius, the best of the catholic high schools on the Niagara frontier.

No, Mother talked big about plans for our future but she always caved in when Daddy dictated ambitions more mundane than those his family fancied. "No one ever made it out of his class in just one generation," he would say.

Of course, the gradations of class were of some interest to Daddy since his peasant family from the area south of Lvov was somehow superior to Mother's stock who came from Tarnow. The floor of humanity, he would call her, when he was really angry.

I had moved into the Taj with Khalum ensconced in the kitchen and Lady wherever she liked. I first had a one room unit which meant I shared a long narrow bathroom with the AID secretary next door, a rather worn looking woman who once asked me to pop a large blackhead on her back. Fortunately, a double unit soon became available and I had the luxury of both a living and a sleeping room. As I sat outside one evening a perfect ring of clouds encircled a pregnant moon. In my budding contentment, I felt certain that the circle augured well.

Lady lay nearby as my thoughts idled back to that Life magazine reporter who'd been aboard the USS Constitition. He'd written a bestseller called "Don't Go Near the Water" and offered to put me in touch with his publisher, Bennett Cerf, the king of Random House. Bill Brinkley had waved to me as he disembarked at Gilbralter, earlier saying that he'd be passing through Delhi in a few months. But, like the time Dr. Barnette , for whom I worked part-time at the University of Buffalo, offered to arrange a job for me with Sloan Wilson who was to teach at UB the next semester, nothing really registered. These things happen to other people. They weren't within the realm of possibility for a shy little girl from upstate New York.

And then there were all those baby-faced Marines who regularly came banging on my door. All the girls said that you had to let them in whenever they appeared even if they'd been drinking, which seemed to be most of the time. Otherwise they'd just force the flimsy door doors wide open. Drinking was about all most Americans seemed to do in their spare time, at least those I came in contact with.

When I finally bought my very first bottle of Scotch at the commissary, I felt like I deserved my fall from Daddy's grace. But so many people had wined and dined me, I just had to reciprocate in kind. In kind in Delhi meant liquor and more liquor.

Of course, apart from alcohol and cigarettes and a few staples like Crisco, there was very little else I could buy since the prices for everything were prohibitive for low ranking staffers. We had to depend on the local produce grown in night soil, a euphemism which at first I didn't understand. To avoid the embarrassment and anguish of Delhi belly, we would eat only fruits and vegetables which could be peeled. No lettuce, no berries and everything else soaked in an iodine solution. The other girls thought me especially favored when one of the Lotharios from the Military Attache's office left an American grown stalk of celery at my door upon his return from a supply flight to the US Air Base in Dhahran.

My first formal dinner, catered by Khalum, was for Lee Rose and his new wife Gertrude, a secretary in the political section who had tried to get me to play bridge. But remembering the old Foreign Service hands on board the Constitution who never seemed to leave their cards to take a breath of sea air, I declined. I had come to India to see India, not to sit in a poorly air conditioned room with a bunch of people who mainly gossiped and complained. They blathered endlessly about the heat, about the servants , about the bugs, about how little they were making, even though most of them were probably living better than they ever had before.

But Gertrude and Lee were different. The three of us went one night to hear Ravi Shankar. Never had I seen and heard such exultant joy as the master of the sitar sat cross legged on a rug in the middle of an otherwise empty stage improvising ragas with his tabla player for hours on end. Here was Mozart reincarnated in an eastern mode before my very eyes, laughing with the universe. Gertrude too reveled in the ecstasy of the moment but Lee signalled his disinterest by falling asleep midway through.

After the four hour concert, we returned to my place where Khalum had prepared a feast, with the piece de resistance a rooster formed of mashed potatoes with gravied chicken in its back. Gertrude and I ooh-ed and ah-ed appropriately but Lee refused to touch it. "I don't want anybody playing with my potatoes before I eat them," he said, removing himself to the couch where he promptly returned to his nap.

It hadn't taken too long to discover that servants were not a luxury. First of all shopping had to be done each day because there was very little refrigeration. And since Hindus are not meat eaters, Khalum had to travel to Old Delhi on his bicycle to find Muslim meat wallahs who would sell the mutton which came to be a staple for me and for Lady. The dhobi who washed and ironed my clothes by hand worked six days a week as did the sweeper. For the services of the three I paid out a grand total of $22 a month. The old hands thought me extravagant. Maybe I was, but for five dollars a month more than the going rate, I got the best servants in the compound.

Before I received my assignment to Delhi, I knew India was on the other side of the world. Like most Americans that's just about all I knew evern though I'd studied history with the best, Selig Adler, who did not believe in the theory of progress. Fortunately the Embassy sent new arrivals to a two-week orientation course sponsored by the School of Economics at Delhi University. We were given a survey of the history, art and religions of India, together with her place in the contemporary world. They also threw in a few Hindi lessons. We met in a brand new building , so new that noeating facilities existed for miles around. They did manage coffee and tea, however. Among the highlights of the session was the wise and reasoned welcome of our own ambassador, Ellsworth Bunker.

Ambassador Bunker epitomized true American aristocracy. Tall and distinguihed are but paltry external descriptions. I shall never forget the Saturday afternoon soon after my arrival, when, as duty code clerk, I was called to the Embassy to deal with a "Niact" (night action), a telegram which required immediate attention. Ambassador Bunker arrived in his limousine within a few minutes and together we waited for the Marine guard who was making his rounds. When the young soldier finally appeared to unlock the door, Ambassador Bunker held i open for me, perhaps then the lowest ranking member of his American staff. Such behavior described all aspects of his being.

The Marines, despite their posture of cynical bravado, would recount with awe and admiration the time the ambassador left his briefcase in his office, a serious security violation from which even ambassadors were not exempt. Returning to the Embassy to retrieve it, he said: "I believe you gentlemen are holding something for me," saluting the boys for doing their duty well.

Mrs. Bunker, too, that is the first Mrs. Bunker, was graciousness personified. Her big project in India, for which she became much beloved, was to secure long handles for the sweepers so that they were not constantly on their knees but could stand tall like other men even though they were the outcastes, the untouchables banished by birth from intercourse with all save other souls who similarly defile the easth. Gandhi called them the children of God.

I started exploring many different parts of Delhi, both old and new. The "new" city, built a century earlier during the height of the British Raj, was where the fashionable shops were to be found on Connaught Circus, where the Parliament buildings were of such size that anything in Europe made one smile at the pretensions of the western world. It was where the maidans or open public spaces were so wide that they might easily accommodate returning hordes of Mughals. Now golf clubs coexisted with polo fields and the diplomatic enclave pressed against the city's eastern boundaries. Bullocks and barefoot paupers wandered at their pleasure, even up the magnificent staircases of Rastrapati Bhavan, an enormous palace of red sandstone built for the British viceroy but since 1947 occupied by the president of the world's most populous democracy.

But to go into Old Delhi was to pass into the glorious age of Akbar and Shah Jahan. The Red Fort stood guard over swirling dervishes of color, a constant kaleidoscope of motion. Tongas and bullocks and taxis fought for their share of the streets with prostitutes and chickens and children snd saddhus and street corner merchants.

It was here that the Lord Krishna danced his eternal dances of wonder and love and struggle and courage. It was here the beloved blue incarnation of Vishnu reigned supreme. It was here that there was life without end.

As I wandered the narrow streets luxuriating in the sights and smell of mango and chutney, of tandoori chiken and silvered sweets, of orange blossoms and opium overlaid by the odor of dung from both man and beast, I paused to examine some gold colored bangles of spun glass. A band of beggar children besieged me with demands for naie paise. I was beside myself until Doug Heck appeared. He cajoled them away in ragged Hindistani. They laughed and went away.

Doug was playing pukka sahib with his two young daughters. Judy, the younger, was fey and freckled; Betsy dark and tall and self-possessed. He suggested that we all have tea on Chandi Chowk before heading back to New Delhi in a tonga. The old India hand charmed the bearer who brought chai to the children and to the young woman who felt more like a third, less knowing daughter, so tongue-tied and tentative were my attempts to enter into the easy familiarity with which they enjoyed this pungent universe of motion, heat and sound. The four of us rolled back to Delhi behind a skinny Sikh and his even skinnier horse.

The monsoons soon chased away a little of the appalling heat. One day during alull the Marines came rapping on doors to round up recruits for a trip to Agra. Six of us piled into a jeep and off we charged hellbent through many villages, maintaining our speed while the driver blew constantly on his horn to part the seas of souls who momentarily evaporated as we sped pellmell through the space they seemingly still occupied.

As we continued south, the rain fell so heavily that we saw neither shape nor color in the opaque greyness running down the windshield. The mud dwellings were dissolving into Daliesque deformity and armies of vultures sat silently in the fields, drying their wings in the intervals between the rains.

But to call the monsoon rain is like referring to a hurricane as a breeze out of Africa. A monsoon is solid water. It is a relentless river under which one lives without surcease for months on end. It is the cascading Niagara of all downpours and when it abates the holy rivers flood their banks and the earth inland begins to steam. The poor wretches in the villages and on the streets need not fear hell since they already knew its torments. They warned us that the water would soon reach our windows if we continued.

Some weeks later we ventured forth again, this times in the early evening. Three hours later we arrived in village much like many others. We navigated the narrow, twisting streets and stopped at a small enclosure. Even at 5'4" I had to stoop at a low opening. There, across a long reflecting pool, was the most ethereal monument to love ever constructed by hand of man. The Taj Mahal floated in the shimmering light of the full moon, its minarets magnifying the voluptuous dimensions of Mumtaz, the eternal queen whose bones lay buried with her husband beneath its Nughal dome.

The Shah Jahan had emptied his treasury in order to build this testament of his love for the woman who died giving birth to his fourteenth child. His son, Aurangzeb, took umbrage, imprisoning his father and seizing his throne before a twin black marble mausoleum could be completed cross the River Jumna. I would see the Taj several more times before I left India, but never would it be more beautiful than it was in that first breathtaking glance through a service entrance.

A few days later as I was leaving the code room after seven in the evening, Doug called to me from his office. "Some AID consultants are in town on their way to Nepal. I'm having a little picnic at the house for them this weekend. It would be great fun if you could join us."

The house was much like any large old rambling bungalow on a tree shaded, Norman Rockwell block except for the heavy perfume of orange blossoms and the presence of a dour Bengali who passed silently through the awkward little group, offering iced drinks and removing our overburdened plates. As evening fell, Betsy disappeared and Judy shivered by the pool. Several couples soon said their goodbyes and I remained with Judy and an AID man.

"Don't leave," Doug whispered. "This fellow is convinced that I'm with the CIA and he wants to stay and fish for confirmation." I felt uncomfortable as Libby, Doug's wifer, was out of town but since the company was much more graceful than that of post-adolescent Marines, I stayed. Long after dark the AID fellow finally left.

Suddenly a star streamed steadily across the sky. "It's the Sputnik, man's first step into the fiery firmaments," Doug said, giving me a little hug. "The Soviets have proven once again that all things are possible. Now all we have to do is play catch up."

I softly volunteered that there once had been a time when I'd know all the constellations in the sky. But that was long ago when I was ten or so, when I still dreamt big dreams and thought I'd join Copernicus in calculating the measure of infinity.

Doug laughed and said that 23 was not so very old. Perhaps I'd learn to track the heavens yet. He offered to drive me home but I demurred, instinctively knowing that a taxi would attract less attention on my way back to the Taj.

"Before you go, there's something I've been wanting to tell you," he said, pouring himself another "snort," the inelegant term he always used for yet another glass of scotch. "A lot of people think I'm with the agency because I'm opening up Nepal. I do deal with some of the operatives including Dewey Clarridge who is my very good friend. So I know a few of the code words. But I'm not a spy. It's very important to me that you believe this."

Orion stalked his prey in the brilliant autumn sky.

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