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My Missionary Family Pt 3 : Ocean Liners and St. Thomas

My folks and two older brothers landed in Bombay on 2 February 1952. A second application for a visa had been successful and 28 days after leaving New York they squinted at the skyline of India’s largest city ‘with its many high-rises [that] looked pale yellow in the hazy afternoon sun, more modern looking that we had expected. 

The country where they would live and work for nearly 40 years was still young then.  Four and half years earlier the British had left in a rush leaving behind two new countries. Pakistan and India, to sort out the affairs of state amidst deep political divisions over the Partition of the subcontinent, heightened communal identify and sensitivity, a bankrupt treasury and a level of poverty that had been severely exacerbated by several massive famines in Bengal, Punjab and Sindh. 

Politically, Pakistan was in turmoil. Their first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan had been assassinated in October 1951, which saw the first direct intervention of the military in the country’s governance, a legacy the people of Pakistan continue to fight against.  The UN had declared a ceasefire in January 1951 and sent peacekeepers to Kashmir to manage the fallout of the first of four wars fought over that territory.   

India had the good fortune of being led by a charismatic visionary Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who enjoyed stature across the globe.  When the SS Stratheden, a British ocean liner that carried troops (during the war) and mail (after) between the UK and Australia, and which George Orwell had sailed to Morocco on in 1938, dropped anchor at Ballard Pier in Bombay, India’s first parliamentary elections since gaining independence were almost complete.  Nehru’s Congress party would win easily and remain in power for the next 25 years.  

In Madras, the original Indian colonial city, 1300 kms southeast of Bombay, a cricket match between England and India got underway on the 6th of February.  King George VI died that same day, placing young Elizabeth on the throne where she would remain for many years after mom and dad both passed away.  India went on to gain its first Cricket Test victory in that match which marks the rise of the mighty Indian team of our times.  

Our family, and few missionaries that we knew,1 cared little for cricket.  It was a quaint British game played over 5 (!) days by princes and engineers.  Like polo, it was an elite sport. Nothing like the massively wealthy and dominant public phenomenon it is today. Field hockey was the more popular and accomplished sport1 in those years. 

We weren’t Brits so the change of monarchs in the UK would have been little more than headline news. There was, however, one anniversary or milestone that Dad would have liked (and probably knew). That his own missionary career was beginning exactly 1900 years after one of Christ’s own apostles had first arrived in India.  The tradition (which is generally accepted) tells of St. Thomas, one of the original Twelve, landing along the south east coast of India in the vicinity of the modern city of Chennai (Madras)in 52 CE. He preached to the locals and had some success but other locals, usually identified as stuffy Brahmins, murdered him around 72 CE.  But he left behind India’s first indigenous Christian community and church, the Mar Thoma, which can, with strong historical evidence, claim to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest Christian community outside of Palestine.  

Syro-Malabar icon of Throne of St. Thomas the Apostle

If I’m to understand my parents’ life as missionaries in India I have to spend some time exploring a much broader history, that of Christian India, which pre-dates any formal European missionary by nearly 2 millennia.  In the next few instalments, I’m going to highlight some of the highpoints in that fascinating but underreported history. 

  1. India holds the record for most consecutive Olympic Golds (6) and most total Olympic Golds (8) in the sport. ↩︎

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My Missionary Family Pt. 2

By mid-1951 Dad and Mom’s preparations to leave for India were in high gear. The few worldly possessions they had accumulated were packed away, ready to be shipped to their new home, or stored in the garages and basements of relatives in Minneapolis.   They had been recruited by a mission board known as the Oriental Missionary Society (OMS), a minnow in a lake dominated by the mainline Methodist and Presbyterian churches.  

They were excited but anxious, not knowing what to expect or how to prepare for what was going to be their first 5yr tour of duty.  They received two bits of advice from senior missionaries. Dad writes about the first one: 

Orville French (an OMS missionary in India) accompanied us for a walk. He encouraged us to keep focused on India–’a desperately dark and needy land’, he said. Later while studying in Houghton [College, New York] we corresponded with the Frenches who had arrived in Gadag by then. In one of his letters Orville asked us about our conjugal relationship. Hmm. He said that couples planning to serve in India, especially, needed to be sure that they were well adjusted sexually, and ‘at peace’ with their sex lives. For India, he warned, was a place where sex was overtly ‘worshipped’ (Shiva phallus symbol, erotic temple carvings etc.) and this might prove to be troublesome! His concern was doubtless given in the context of what happened to two missionary families who were forced to return home because of the husbands’ improprieties. Orville’s questions we found a bit intriguing, and actually the ‘only word of counsel’ we had from OMS on how to get ready for India. 

Now. If there ever was a paragraph that deserved unpacking, this is it.  But Dad’s final statement is not entirely accurate.  Mom wrote of another piece of advice they received, this time from Orville’s wife, Aileen. 

Aileen, in response to my queries as to what to bring with us, replied that India (and Gadag in particular) was rather drab and dreary, so ‘Bring whatever you can to make your home cheery and cozy.’ One surprising suggestion was to bring toilet paper—India’s being hard to obtain and or poor quality, if and when available. We packed a [55 gallon] drum full of it when we sailed for our first term. 

Thus alerted to the pitfalls they could expect to find, they were ready to set sail from New York in September, 1951.  With tickets booked and much of their luggage enroute to New York, they were informed that their visa had been refused by the Indian government.  This was, in Dad’s words, ‘a slap in the face’ and suddenly it looked as if the erotic temples, jewel encrusted turbans and lost souls would remain figments of their imaginations forever. 

The Indian government’s hardening stance against new missionaries was a theme of many family conversations throughout my childhood.  Though individuals who could be classified as Christian missionaries had been in India since the early years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and though southern India was home to one of the oldest orthodox churches in the world, predating any European missionary presence by centuries, the ‘modern’ missionary movement in India really began in the early 18th century. 

It is a story filled with ups and downs and long periods of marginalization followed by shorter bouts by lionization before an inevitable return to ostracism. I’ll write more about that at some other point, but for now, the refusal of a visa for Mom and Dad, though disappointing for them, was not surprising given the political context of a newly independent country. 

Indian elites had waged an ever more acrimonious and violent war of resistance against Imperial Britian, aka The Raj, for decades. Indeed, you could make the case that the ‘natives had been restless’ for more than a century and that the first mass armed uprising against the British had taken place in 1857, when a loose coalition of soldiers, disempowered regional rulers and peasants, nearly succeeded in wiping all Europeans off the north Indian map. 

The country’s new rulers, though committed to building a non-sectarian, secular state, viewed missionaries as a subversive, antiquated, anachronistic and altogether unwanted cohort of foreigners living in their midst.  Missionary evangelizing, as unsuccessful as it was in convincing more than a handful of Indians to renounce the faith of their birth, was especially hated.  

Prominent leaders including the Governor General Mr. Rajagopalachari and Prime Minister Nehru expressed their views that missionaries were cultural aggressors and foreign fifth columnists. An official investigation in the early 50s by the government of Madhya Pradesh concluded:  

Evangelisation in India appears to be part of a uniform world policy to revive Christendom, to re-establish Western supremacy and is not prompted by spiritual motives. The objective is to disrupt the solidarity of the non-Christian societies, with danger to the security of the State. Enormous sums of foreign money flow into the country, and it is out of such funds that the Lutherans and other proselytising agencies were able to secure nearly four thousand converts. Missions are in some places used to serve extra-religious ends. As conversion muddles the convert’s sense of solidarity with his society there is a danger of his loyalty to his country being undermined. 

A vile propaganda against the religion of the majority is being systematically and deliberately carried out so as to create an apprehension of breach of public peace. There has been an appreciable increase in the American personnel of missionary organisations in India. 

Which must be halted immediately, the report declared.  

Things didn’t look good for wannabe missionaries like Rudy and Eleanore Rabe and their two young sons Michael (4) and Gregg (2). 

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Exit and Entry

33 years 2 months and 2 days ago Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as leader of the Soviet Union. The next day, 26 January 1991, the world learned that the Soviet Union itself, had ceased to exist as a political entity.

I watched Gorbachev on American TV. The enormity of his resignation and the dissolution of USSR silenced the room. The consequences of it were unclear but generally I think everyone felt lighter; things were bound to get better.

Today, I watched President Trump and VP Vance go on TV and announce their desire to join a new USSR, led by their buddy Vlad Putin. The enormity of this decision was lost in a squabble of hectoring and scolding more akin to a WWE extravangza than a diplomatic photo opp.

Just as Gorbachev’s announcement stunned the world, so too the Dynamic Duo’s performance on live TV today, has left the world immobile with shock. Only instead of hope we watch in horror, knowing for sure that only worse lies ahead.

A few months earlier I had watched Boris Yeltsin jump onto a tank in the middle of Moscow and rally his fellow Russians to resist the coup that had been launched by hardline Communists against Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s ballsy!’ And the people rallied, the coup was put down and Big Boris led them into a new era.

I don’t watch TV or read much news anymore. But I find it interesting that Yeltsin’s demonstration of leadership and purpose is apparently so uninspiring to the politicians of the Greatest Country in the History of Humanity. Our leaders, our so-called Yeltsins’, our hardcore anti-Putin hawks, now flap their wings and coo quietly in harmony with the two assholes at the top.

DJT is leading us into a new era too.

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Historical Fiction and the Saviour of the World

All religions are rife with factions. And in that way, they are a manifestation of the most primitive and base of human instincts.  Group think. Tribalism. Belief regardless of a lack of evidence. Even evidence to the contrary.     

I was born and nurtured within the ‘Bible is the inerrant Word of God’ tribe.  The people who insist that every word, every story, every miracle found within the Christian/Jewish Bible is cent per cent pure and untainted by any contradiction or human failing.  The Universe was created in six 24-hour days. Elijah ascended to ‘heaven’ in a burning chariot. The Supreme Lord of Everything addressed Abraham through a burning bush. Wine to water. 2 pieces of bread and 5 sardines fed 5000 people.   You get the picture. 

I should clarify. My father, our clan leader, actually felt most comfortable in a sub-faction of this larger tribe.  I would call it ‘the Bible is the actual reflection of God’s mind but not 100% historically or scientifically accurate’.   He argued that science and learning were needed to understand the mysteries of such a revered set of writings as the old and new testaments. He would acknowledge (later in life) that humans did not have the capacity to understand ‘God’  and so, ultimately, whether or not Jesus did turn a cistern of water into Merlot at the wedding party, it was not worth starting a war over. He liked to believe it, but he and others in the sub-faction allowed space for individual interpretation. 

I have no personal faith or belief in Jesus, Yahweh, God or any other such divine creature. But I had a good childhood and my 25 years of practicing Christianity has made an indelible imprint on my mind.  I cannot and do not want to excise that part of me.  I find great comfort in many passages of the Bible (OT and NT).  I still love and sing along to the hymns and choruses I learned from countless Bible Clubs, camps and revival services.  And throughout my adult years I have enjoyed reading academic and true-believer debates about all manner of Biblical studies and archaeology.    

I recently read a book titled Jesus Interrupted. I didn’t finish it because it was a bit too elementary for me. The author, is an ex-believer like myself, but a scholar of the Bible. His audience seems to be those of the ‘Bible is the inerrant Word of God’ tribe who are looking for encouragement to use their minds rather than practice blind faith.  I can hear him whispering to them ‘It’s ok. Jump. You won’t be crushed by what you find.’  

He spends a lot of time talking about ‘contradictions’ and ‘inconsistencies’ within the 4 Gospels and other books of the New Testament.  Of which there are many. And which should be sufficient for any unbiased reader to understand that what they are reading is not History.  For those who have come to believe that the God of the Bible is a distinct and discrete being, separate from the Universe, and who’s wont is to stick his hand into the petri dish called Earth and mess things up or direct action in a particular way, the notion that the story of the 3 wise men or the resurrection is not the accurate tale of an actual event, is a hard concept to embrace. 

I have published two novels, the first of which is what bookstores label, ‘historical fiction’.  It is set in mid-20th century Iraq and as such the narrative refers to and is framed by actual events. And people who are historical figures, the most prominent of which is Saddam Hussain.  But there are many others who pop up, mostly in very minor and insignificant roles.  The main characters are entirely fictional and most of the happenings that the book describes are real only to the characters. They have no basis in history.  

If you used my book to prepare for a trip to Iraq you might get a EXTREMELY HIGH LEVEL  glimpse of the turbulent political history of modern Iraq up to about 1985. But I hope no one would ascribe the words I put in the mouth of real historical figures as ‘accurate’ or historical.  The point of my book, what got me going, was to explore and try to understand the idea of politically-motivated violence against people who think differently.  Torture.  What goes on in the mind of the man who willingly and knowingly inflicts physical pain upon those who have been captured and have no way to fight back? 

I was not writing and didn’t set out to write a description of the Ba’ath party or Iraqi politics.  It was my way of unpacking an issue I was confronted with on a daily basis when I worked with the UN refugee agency. 

As I read Jesus, Interrupted it dawned on me that the best way to describe the Gospels and other Biblical stories is as “historical fiction”.   They are historic in the sense that they describe a society and historical figures that really did exist. But they are like tent poles or stakes that hold the story up but which are really supportive rather than central to the action.  Yes, there was a tough guy named Pontius Pilate. And there were a group of Jews known as Pharisees. Nazareth and Bethlehem can be found on a map. But anything beyond this sort of thing is historically iffy. Even the historic reality of the central hero, Jesus. 

The gospels, written decades after Jesus was allegedly crucified, by unknown writers, were composed to tell a specific story to a specific audience. The story was one of spiritual and moral guidance not a biography of the Nazarene. 

None of this is fresh insight. It’s as old as the hills.  But it does help me understand these essential texts of my life.  They are not history. But they are not fiction, either. They are historical fiction. 

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Were the Dark Ages really that bad? W(h)ither Aidland?

I’ve been scanning a few articles and posts on LinkedIn about the crash&burn approach to USAID of the new Trusk administration.  There are two broad schools of thought being advocated. 

The Insider School: this is the worst possible and most unfair action taken against an agency that strives to do only good. The hardship faced by many tens of thousands employee, contractors and implementing partners down the food chain is the main objection, with many expressing solidarity with this newly and unexpectedly large cohort of jobless humanitarians.  Suddenly everyone has the green halo around their profile picture; I’m Open to Work.  

Indeed, this is a shitful way to begin a new year.  I am not directly impacted by Trusk’s actions but suddenly my already slim chances of finding employment within the sector I’ve worked in my entire career are as close to nil as they can possibly be.   

Imagine a series of ponds connected by a stream.  The one at the top is full with just a few fish in it. The middle pond has lots of water but also a huge number of fish.  The stream has been silting up for time and some fish have been struggling to breathe for years. Yet, for the most part the pond has just enough water and oxygen to maintain the status quo.  In the third pond, the water levels are really low but the fish are smaller and seem to be able to do ok though they are constantly aware that the stream from the middle pond is getting dammed and blocked.  

Overnight the top pond is drained of all its water. In a panic, the fish there move into the middle pond. But this is not a solution because the largest feeder stream is dry and the pond’s water supply has dropped by nearly 50%. But there are a huge number of new fish to accommodate. 

In the third pond, fish are dying fast.  Not to mention the many animals surrounding the ponds that depend on the water to survive.  

It’s easy to understand the solution demanded by this group school of thought. Reinstate USAID and all its funding immediately. Turn the tap back on and let the water flow once more.  

The Opportunity School of Thought: This is advocated mainly by (many) fish in the middle and lower ponds. And fisheries experts who work at think tanks and write blogs. The basic argument is: the structure of the ponds and streams was inherently unfair and broken.  The top fish have always determined the quantity and quality of the water flowing to the lower ponds and for the fish in the lower ponds and the animals who depend on the water in the pond, the emptying of the top pond is probably an opportunity to rebuild the system so that it is more equitable. 

No one has yet articulated what a new system might look. The prescriptions are finely articulated statements of principle that have been echoing around Aid-Land forever. They all appear to ignore the cruel reality that we fish, and the animals we support, need water. And if we are going to support a lot of animals and really attack the problems that the animals face, we need lots of water for a long, long time.   

Ok, enough already of this silly analogy. 

The point is that large scale development and humanitarian responses require large volumes of money. And on a steady basis. Governments are generally the only source of such largesse.  Sure, there are billionaires and rich corporations but their interests are extremely narrow and self-serving.  The private sector will never be a reliable source of base funding for humanitarian or development work. 

So, I’m sceptical of the Opportunity school. Of course, if USAID is gone for good NGOs will adjust. Many will cease to exist altogether (not bad in itself); almost all will downsize, shrink their ambition and keep their heads down even lower.  But I’m not holding my breath for a new government led aid infrastructure and financing system to emerge that will be better than the one we love to hate currently. 

And there is a lot to hate. Bureaucracy. Hypocrisy. Conditionality. Compliance over assistance. Risk transfer. Salaries. Bad CEOs with no accountability. Lack of diversity at the top. Recycled thinking. Opaque transparency. Salaries. Sexual harassment and abuse. Baked-in white middle-class privilege.  Over-weening earnestness. Commerical firms who market themselves as humanitarian but are profit making machines for shareholders. 

But the one thing, above all other things, that sucks about the aid business is the donor-implementing partner (be they big hairy international behemoths or a local disabled persons NGO in the south Pacific) relationship. Governments are not just the only viable source of sustainable financing for aid but they call the shots. Their Congresses and Parliaments put so many ridiculous conditions on the receipt of and spending of their funds that many NGOs spend as much time, if not more, filling out reports for donors to ensure they are not violating an ever-growing number of conditions, as they do actually helping actual people.  

For all our claims to be innovative and independent, we have always been beholden to what the State Department or Foreign Office wants.  

This doesn’t put me in the Insider’s camp. I sympathize with those who lost their jobs. Doing away overnight with such a major pillar of the Aidland superstructure will be nothing but disastrous.  And given how most countries take signals from the White House the impact on Aidland is going to be widespread and indefinite.  

I don’t have a solution but frankly I cannot think of any group that can replace government funded aid agencies. 100 Soros’ can’t compete.  I don’t see new scalable financing models emerging. Innovation will happen but at the local level only.  Like democracy, government funded aid is the best of many flawed systems.

The Golden Age of International NGOs and AID is well and truly over. Maybe the Dark Ages weren’t really so bad. 

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Little Krishnas

Young boys dressed up as young Krishna on the occasion of Sri Krishna Jayanti, 2009. Near Trisshur, Kerala.

I didn’t really learn about India until I left to attend University in Minnesota.  I had lived there virtually all my life up to that point and had a slightly above average knowledge of Hindi but it was pretty rough. I understood India as the place where I felt most at home in the world. A place I identified as ‘home’. But I had only the sketchiest understanding of Indian history; the sitar and Hindi movies summed up Indian culture.

My world was largely European/American/white/Christian. Though I grew up speaking an Indian language as early as or even before English, though I had many Indian playmates and in school, close mates, and though my family in no way tried to isolate ourselves from Indians or Indian culture and society, by dint of another culture and tradition I knew precious little about, that of evangelical missionaries in India, Indian culture remained a vague notion with very few points of clarity and authentic appreciation. 

This came home to me in my early semesters in University. I got into mid-level Hindi class only to discover how limited my vocabulary was and how ungrammatical was my speech. I really didn’t know how to write a coherent paragraph.  The name Mohammad Rafi had never registered with  me. Whilst reading a passage from a newspaper aloud in class (my pronunciation/accent was always very good) I stumbled at the reference to ‘Rafi’. As there are no capital letters in written Hindi I didn’t realise it was a name; the sentence didn’t make any sense.  Ultimately, the professor, who himself had never been to India, had to tell me that Rafi was a proper name and referred to India’s most famous male singer, Mohammad Rafi.  

I think my choice of South Asian Studies as my undergrad major and then my Masters in Modern South Asian history, were attempts to make up for this huge ignorance about the place I said I loved and that I called home. 

After formal education my years in Pakistan enlightened me about the impacts of Modern Indian history and how tangled and fascinating is the relationship between Pakistan and India.  

In 2010 I began blogging about music. All kinds. But I understood that I could create a bit of niche and a following by focusing on South Asian music, another subject about which I was almost completely ignorant. And so, my learning and education about India (in the broadest sense of that term) continued.  My current research on the history of the Pakistani movie industry a.k.a. Lollywood, is the same. It seems I have an unsatiable desire to learn ever more about the subcontinent.

There was no subject more unknown to and less understood by me then the world of Hindu philosophy and religion. Naturally, missionary children were not encouraged to learn too much about it for obvious reasons. To fight this ‘dark force’ was what had brought my parents to India in the first place. But also, I had enough of spiritual instruction and religious activity in my daily life already. Daily prayers and Bible readings, devotions, camps, Bible clubs, spiritual conventions and tent meetings, church services and baptisms.  The idea of trying to figure out a second religion was the last thing on my mind.  Creedence and the Beatles, Dev Anand and Zeenat Aman were far more exciting fields to plough. 

I still know so little about it, though I do love reading the many stories behind the many aspects of God that Hindus and Indians have concocted and pay homage to. 

I was in Kerala on business.  One evening I hired a taxi to visit a friend who lived near Trisshur. I wasn’t going to take my cameras but after the quiet voice reminded me, “Take your camera with you everywhere you go,” I headed out. 

About half way there we turned a corner to find the road blocked by these young fellas. 

A couple villages were celebrating Krishna Janamasthami the annual festival of Krishna’s birth. Families celebrate by swinging their youngest son around in circles and then painting young boys in blue, placing cardboard crowns on their heads and wandering around the village singing, laughing and pretending to play the flute, Lord Krishna’s instrument of love.  Later, entire busloads of villagers will visit the Guruvayur Shri Krishna Temple in Thrisshur for more ritualistic and formal acts of worship. Like many places, the temple claims to trace its history back 5000 years (doubtful) and is one of southern India’s largest places of Krishna worship, something usually associated with north India. 

Krishna in his infancy and boyhood is known as Balakrishna, (literally, child Krishna). A stage on his life remembered for his mischievousness and antics. He is depicted in books, magazines, murals, calendars and stickers with chubby cheeks, rolls of fat on his little belly and often with his hands full of butter which he has stolen from his mother.

The following bhajan tells that story.

Balakrishna postcard

 

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Running Home (pt 1)

When I was 15 I ran away.

Like most teenagers, I had a fantasy about running away from home.  I was going to escape and ride my push bike 2500 km to the tip of India. I was going to live a life free of adult authority along the Grand Trunk road. I was going to go far away.

But when the moment came to make a dash, I ran straight home.

**

The Himalayan monsoon that year seemed to have no end. The rains had come early and weeks went by without a glimpse of blue sky. By mid-July, my heart was aching for some warmth and a flat horizon

Mussoorie, the hill station where I attended boarding school, was  hemmed in with a brittle, misty fog that pricked your skin like needles. Every tree dripped. The narrow dirt trails we navigated around the hillside had turned into rivelets of mud.

One Sunday the claustrophobia was particularly intense. The dampness of the trees, clouds and earth had soaked into every pore of my body. I couldn’t get warm and I couldn’t shake the restlessness that had been building up for days.

I and a few friends had spent the weekend in the basement of a friend’s house at the top of a prominent hill in town. On Sunday afternoon, the crowd I hung with attended Bible Club–two hours of singing, praying and Bible teaching mixed with ping pong, homemade cakes and pretty girls.

That Sunday I sat glumly to one side, resentlng the endless rendition of “Put Your Hand in the Hand of the Man”, coming from a keen group of devotees in the main room. Tim Buehler’s electric guitar had been a novelty the previous year. Today it grated my nerves. I wanted to be away. To be far from this place and be by myself. I pushed my way through my friends to the door which I closed quietly behind me.  

And then I began to run.

My mind was blank but my body took control. I sprinted up the dirt path to the chukkar, a concrete motor road that ran around the top of the hill. Within seconds, almost with every step, a plan developed in my mind.  Ten minutes of jogging got me to Dr Olsen’s place. I charged into the basement and rifled through the pockets of whosever jeans I could find. I fished out three rupees from one pair.  With my sleeping roll under my arm, I half marched, half ran down the chakkar toward town.

My heart beat madly. I was exhilarated by my decision though I was not yet sure what it was. I was heading for the bazaar but I didn’t dare think too much about it.

One of the rules of school was that students were not allowed in Mussoorie town, one of India’s most famous tourist destinations, alone and without the permission of a parent or staff member, except on Saturdays. I knew if I met anyone remotely connected with the hierarchy of the school–staff, staff’s spouse, school karmachari or friend of a staff member–I could be legitimately questioned about my presence in town. If I had no written notice on me I would be forced to return.

I made it down Mullingar Hill, a ski slope of a road that wound through Landour, unnoticed. A few shop keepers eyed me with some surprise as I passed by but none tried to stop me.

My biggest fear was meeting Mr Kapadia, the In-Charge of Hostel, the highschool boys residential hall where I lived. In addition to being a strict disciplinarian, Mr K was known to be a raconteur who often went drinking of an evening with his Rotary buddies. What if he approached, gambolling home slightly tipsy?

While my eyes flitted like a criminal’s ahead, to the side and even back, searching for a familiar face, I realized that this was the first time I had actually been in the bazaar on a non-Saturday. The worn familiarity of the alleys and shops had been replaced by a hostile feeling, as if a friend had turned against me. I breathed deep and kept going.

At Thukral’s Photo Studio I sensed victory. It was now only a 5 minute walk to the bus stand. That was the first destination in my half baked plan. What I would do once there I hadn’t yet figured out.

I approached the ticket cubicle of the UP State Roadways Transport Service and shoved my three rupee notes across the counter. A man gave me 75 paise in change along with a ticket.  He nodded at the appropriate bus. It was empty. Not wanting to take a chance I lay down on the seats and waited for the bus to start. Not many people were travelling that evening and once we started swaying around the hairpin bends I sat up. For the first time in weeks I felt myself relax.

**

The bus deposited me at the Dehra Dun Railway station. I knew now that my soul was taking me home to Allahabad, 860 kilometers to the east, but how I was to make the journey remained a mystery. My buying power, all of 75 paise, was limited to 3 cups of tea.

Without much thought (my body still operated as an independent agent) I marched into the Station Master’s office on the main platform. The room was long, orderly and brightly lit by neon tubes that hummed like a swarm of bees.

A uniformed official sat behind a desk surrounded by phones and stacks of papers. He looked up as I came in. I opened my mouth. What came out surprised me. “My mother is sick and I need to return to Allahabad, urgently. I have no money for tonight’s train.” 

He surveyed me for a moment. “You are a student of Woodstock School?”

I nodded.

“Does Mr Kapadia know you are here?”

The mention of the name sent a shiver though my body. I must have mumbled something but can’t recall what. I seemed a stranger to myself.

He reached for a phone and dialled a number. The game was up. I froze.  After a minute he put the phone down and said there was no answer. I backed out of his office. He may or may not have called the Much Feared Kapadia, but he didn’t pursue me.

With Plan A foiled I was fresh out of plans. I paced up and down the platform struggling to keep my panic under check. I knew if I could make it to Hardwar, a couple three hours down the track I’d feel safer. I knew someone there, or at least had a name and a face, if no address. Hardwar was that much further into the Indian plain. And that much farther away from the horrid imprisoning hills. But a certain distance had to be traversed yet. I bought a cup of tea and squatted down to contemplate the dilemma.

The night came up quickly. Tube lights flickered on. I was getting hungry but needed to hold on to my meagre resources, now just half a rupee. Some trains came and others went. I watched them as years later I would watch planes high in the sky and wish I was on them. The beast within me was restless again. He didn’t like this hanging about. I kept walking the platform, crossing the footbridges and back again.

“Where you headed,” a coolie asked me as I shuffled by. He was on his haunches, cupping a bidi in his fist. I squatted next to him and mumbled, “Hardwar.”

“That one leaves tomorrow morning, eight o’clock,” he said indicating a dark chain of carriages.

I would have shared his bidi if he had asked. I usually smoked Four Square when my friends and I were in our secret tea shops in Mussoorie. I wanted smoke in my lungs at that moment. Heat and fire to match my restless anger. He didn’t offer me the bidi but he did yell at a nearby chai wala to give me a clay matka of tea and a nice, soft, cellophane-wrapped tea bun.

I slurped the tea, gratefully. As I chewed, the coolie and I chatted. He asked  where I was from, who my father was and what sort of service he did. I admired the brass identity badge on his arm with a number that certified his official status as a porter. He treated me as if I was his nephew, not a stranger. After a while, when our conversation slowed he showed me where to lay out my sleeping bag on the platform. “In the morning, the bogie you want will stop right here.”

During our chat he had assured me that I shouldn’t worry about not having a ticket. “Do you think all these people have tickets?” His tone indicated what the answer was. “Just don’t jump into a reserved bogie and no one will even look at you.”

The following morning the platform was chaos. As I rolled up my gear my coolie friend appeared amidst the melee. He told me to follow him, then elbowed and abused his way to the carriage. He sat me down by a window. Before he disappeared he smiled at me.

The train started to roll. This was electrifying. Traversing India by train, perhaps because I did it so little and mostly on holidays, was always a thrill. As the carriages lurched and swayed through the ancient Siwalik range I couldn’t have cared less that I had no money, had not eaten a meal in 24 hours and had no address for my friend in the rather large and rather holy pilgrim city of Hardwar, just a couple hours in the future. The sound, the motion and the hot breeze generated by the coal fueled engine had my heart racing. This was very illegal and very fun.

Around mid-morning we pulled into Hardwar. First hurdle was to get past the official who stood at the exit collecting tickets.  One option was to press into the crowd and attempt to squeeze through unnoticed. But with a white face, this was a risky stategy. Instead, I held back until the exiting throng had dissipated and the TC with his pockets full of little cardboard tickets, retired to his fan cooled office. With the coast clear I quickly stepped out of the gate and into the heat.

My plan, such as it was, was to rent a cycle for the day, and seek out a church where I was certain I’d find someone who knew my friend, a recently graduated seminarian from the college where my Dad was principal. In such a predominantly Hindu town as Hardwar, I figured there would be no more than a handful of churches and that they would stick out like sore thumbs. Everyone would know where to find them.

Near the station I found a hire shop and rented an Atlas bike for Rs 1. I gave the man my remaining change and promised the remainder upon return. As I swung my leg onto the seat I asked him where the church was. He shrugged and went back to work. I quickly realized that people came to Harwar to vist a handful of monumental Hindu holy spots and left. Churches were not on anybody’s menu of interesting places.

A passerby called out to me and asked with a twist of his fingers where I was going? “I’m looking for a church to find a friend.”

He acted as if he wasn’t listening but then said, “You’ll find your kind in Jalalabad, at the BHEL compound.”

“Christians?” I said, sounding like a young Vasco da Gama.

Again he shrugged. “Russians. They run that place. Go there they will help you.” He moved away into the crowd.

This was great news. White people. Russians, sure, but white folks nonetheless. I headed toward Jalalabad and after cycling for some time asked a man how far it was. “8 kms,” he said.

My heart quivered. 8 kilometeres?!

The sun was high. My legs felt like they were swelling inside my jeans. Still, the Russians were my only hope.  I pushed on and perhaps half an hour later sighted the huge Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited complex. Tall brick walls with electrified barbed wire skirted a massive industrial estate. Yet the gate was unattended so I wheeled myself in.

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One Kalashnikov + two Kalashnikovs.

In 1996 I visited Afghanistan and Pakistan for an Australian NGO. The Taliban had just captured Kabul a fortnight earlier and thrust, very momentarily, the plight of everyday Afghans back into the international media’s spotlight. Given the current state of Truskland I think these voices are worth revisiting.

He was as new to town as I.

“I came here from Kabul the day before last. My name is Hashim.” He wore a hesitant smile and a blue waistcoat. He had been watching me walk up through the gardens and toward the street. “Will you make my photo?” he asked.

He posed with his arms across his chest and gazed away from the camera with a cinematic expression. I took his picture and asked what had brought him to Mazar-e-Sharif.

“My father told me to get of of Kabul as the Taliban are capturing all young me to fight. I’ll go back when my father tells me. I am staying in a hotel as I have no relatives in Mazar. Its very expensive. All day I sat here watch people in the garden. I sit and think but I try not to think of my family. We had a shoe factory in Kabul. But when the mujahideen came to power they stole everything. Now I am jobless. In Kabul I study English and also kung-fu. But now everything is closed. I don’t go out because it is too dangerous. I am Turkoman. The Taliban are against us. And the Tajiks and Hazaras.

“I saw Najibullah hanging in the street. It made me sad. None of these groups are Muslims. They only kill anyone who doesn’t agree with them. ‘Grow a beard!’ ‘Wear a hat!’ ‘Don’t go outside!” And if you disagree to grow a beard it is the end. For the last 5 years I have seen these people. They are not Muslim.

“See that man there, singing. He’s gone mad. I’ll go mad, too. I sit here everyday. I want to get out of here, to Germany or to an English speaking country but its too expensive.”

*****

Blue Mosque/Tomb of Ali, Mazar-e-Sharif

“How is my English? I have been studying for two years but most foreigners do not like to speak with me. Why is that? One time I asked a foreign man what time it was. He told me, ‘Sharp 4 o’clock!’ That was that. He said no more to me.” Khaililullah spoke excellent English. He was a northern-Pashtun–dark, almost Indian in appearance. But he had born north of Mazar and had recently returned from over 10 years as a refugee in Pakistan.

“I teach English. In Monkey Lane. Will you come and visit our class?” I told him I would come but not today. Today I was interested in visiting the shrine of Ali, the grand blue-tiled mosque around which this desert town spills. I told Khalilullah how much I admired the mosque and its color. “You’re lucky to live so close to such a beautiful building.”

“By the grace of God we have a good leader. General Dostum. He used to be a communist but now he prays five times a day–he’s very good. And powerful. The Taliban are the trouble. They want to keep girls from school And this forcing men to pray in the mosque five times a day. Even our Prophet Mohammad himself only prayed 4 times a day sometimes So who are they to force us?

“Of course. There were excesses in Najib’s time. He gave too much freedom and too quickly. Especially to women. This corrupted us. Women went about barefoot–without shoes and wore nothing at all on their heads. According to Islam, a woman’s head should be covered. But not completely hidden. Both the Taliban and Najib are wrong. God save us from that much freedom. On the other hand under Najib, women and girls were educated and worked. That was good. So he was not entirely bad.”

Najibullah felt that the public hanging of Najibullah was inevitable. In his mind it was a justice of sorts for having allowed women to go barefoot and to be judges. But what he told me next I heard many times during my visit.

“Before they killed him they ordered him to sign his own release papers. He refused. He had denounced communism and discovered patriotism. He did not feel he had to confess to any crimes. But I know from an accurate source that he had memorised the entire Quran. But he refused to sign the papers confessing to anything. So they killed him. But in that, he was right. All Afghans respect Najibullah now. He wasn’t afraid to die. He was a true Afghan.”

When I visit Khalilullah’s school a few days later he refused to discuss anything except English and non-political subjects. “What do you call this?” he asked me, pointing to a shelf. He made not of my response, “A mantel.”

He and his fellow students discussed music and literature as if nothing was wrong with their country. The school had 600 students, women and men, learning English every day. “We want to prepare ourselves for the future. Today you must have knowledge of two things, English and computers, if you want to succeed.”

Jamil was adamant. “What do you believe will happen to Afghanistan?” Before I could respond he went on. “We are fanatics. This is no way to bring universal peace anywhere. And there is no way our people will talk. No way they can win in fighting either. I don’t know what will happen. This fighting will continue. All I know is that I will go to English class and then I’ll go home. Tomorrow? God only knows. Who sees beyond today? We are ready for anything though. My father is not a commander. We are civilians. We want peace and normality. Things like sports and music. My name is Jamil. It means beautiful. We want to help ourselves by learning English but our pronunciation is all bad. What do you think?”

*****

A Tajik grape seller, Faizabad, Afghanistan 1999

*****

“Welcome! Just have a look, no need to buy.”

The huge bearded Afghan stood beckoning to me from the doorway of his carpet shop in Peshawar’s Khyber bazar. It was a typical sales pitch but it soon changed when I enquired about the man who owned the shop next door. He was the son of a friend from Melbourne.

“You want to see Hamid?” he glared at me.

I nodded.

“Communisti!” The word hissed out of mouth like air leaving a tyre. His companions in the shop immediately turneds toward me and smiled sheepishly.

“Hamid is no good man. He is a foreigner. And communist. He supported Russians and speaks their language.” The man stumbled about for words to express his dissatisfaction with his neighbor. He spoke broken English and felt limited in what he could say.

“Communists. Uzbeks. Hazaras. Very bad.” He made a gesture with his finger slicing across his neck. “They are not Afghans. They are Angrez!”

I asked what he meant by calling Uzbeks and Hazaras, the most Mongol-featured of Afghans, Englishmen.

“He means they are foreigners. They have come to Afghanistan only recently. They are not true Afghans. We Pashtuns are real Afghans. The others are not. They are so small in number, not like us. Pashtuns are 60% of Afghan people. The others are only few. Miniorities, you know.” This man who spoke better English wouldn’t tell me his name but he did identify himself as working as a ‘spokesman’ for the Taliban office in Peshawar. “I know very well the Taliban. They are very good. They are against Communism and foreign domination.

“You see, we are refugees in Pakistan. It is not good for us to say that we want to control Pakistani politics of government. This is not our right. We should only sit quietly and do our business. It is not right for us to force our desires on the Pakistani public. And so it is with Uzbeks and Tajiks–though Tajiks are not so bad. But Uzbeks and Hazaras. They are refugees, not true Afghans. They came only in the last 40 years and now they want to dominate the whole country. But it is for us Pashtuns to control Afghanistan. This is our country. Uzbeks should return to Uzbekistan and Tajiks to Tajikistan. Why should they stay in Afghanistan?”

The bearded carpet seller broke in again. It is very dangerous here these days. Every day the Shi’a are attacking Sunnis. We must kill the Shi’a.”

Most Hazara Afghans, the poorest and historically most discriminated against of all Afghan minority groups, are Shi’a.

The TV in the shop began broadcasting an old Pakistani film romance. The men ignore me and lay down on the carpets in front of the TV. A woman danced through a rose and fountain garden to a lively folks tune. The men smiled as they watch the star dance.

I didn’t bother to ask them about the Taliban’s attitude toward women.

*****

The next day I had tea with an Afghan refugee family. They had come to Pakistan after the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992. They were secular, non-Pashtun Afghans. Educated abroad and middle class. For four and a half years they had lived in Peshawar.

The matriarch of the family, Hafeeza (not her real name) has lost a husband, two sons and two daughters. Her husband, a senior figure in the PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan), the Soviet-backed party that ruled Afghanistan from 1978-1992, was assassinated in 1989. Her eldest son and daughter were kidnapped in 1992 by triumphant and vengeful mujahidin in Kabul. “I have no idea why they were taken from me. These people hate everyone…especially people who they consider communists or Russians.

“My eldest daughter was a doctor. Since the day of her marriage I have not seen her. She may be dead. Or she may be living secretly someplace. But I’m sure she is dead because even if she was in Mazar or overseas she would contact me.”

Hafeeza had been the principal of a large school in Kabul. In Peshawar she had tried to get a job as a teacher but had been turned from every door, called a communist and foreigner. “I have even tried to have young children come here to our house for tutorials but parents forbid their children from attending because they believe I will teach them wrong things.”

She smiled ironically. Another member of the family took over. “In the schools here in Peshawar, which are controlled and run by the mujahidin and Taliban, Afghan children are taught to kill people like us.”

She puled out a text book which looked like any normal grade-school primer. Poorly drawn figures and large simple sentences filled each page. Instead of apples and kitten the lessons used AK-47s as object lessons. 1 Kalashnikov plus 2 Kalashnikovs equals how many Kalashnikovs? On the following page, a similar arithmetic problem used grenades.

“What will happen to our children? What is the future of our country if they are taught such things? They are taught to hate and kill. Their masters in school teach them that if they kill 3 Communists or kafirs they will become ghazi. No wonder they hate us. Our lives are in danger. We cannot get work and we are afraid to move about in the streets.” Hafeeza broke down.

The other family member told me, “Just six weeks ago, her only remaining son was kidnapped here in Shaheen town. He was going to an English class be he never returned. He had been threatened and warned by some bearded people a few times, ‘we know who your rather was. You are a communist and Russian.’ Hafeeza asked him not to go out but he was young and wanted to learn something. But now he’s gone and I’m sure he’s dead.”

Hafeeza stared blankly at the floor. Her only remaining child, a 19 year old daughter, comforted her mother, though she herself was in tears. “They do not go out at all these days. They are afraid after what happened. Who will protect us? We are not communists and we are not Russians. Our fault is we are not Pashtun and we oppose the Taliban. For this they want to kill us.”

The family has siblings and parents in Melbourne. But their repeated attempts to get visas to come to Australia have failed.

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My Desi Heart: Intro

Allahabad, 1965

I was born in India in 1957.  The youngest of four siblings in an American missionary family from small town North Dakota and Minnesota. We were evangelicals. Conservative in a Protestant theology heavily influenced by the Holiness movement of the 19th century. Small sect Methodism that believed all sinners could be completely ‘sanctified’ or perfect, in their lifetimes. Among other things of course. 

I was born in the southern Tamil temple city of Madurai but we lived 850 kilometers northwest in a Kanarese speaking area of what is now the Indian state of Karnataka. Dad’s employer, the Oriental Missionary Society or OMS, had established a bible training college in the town of Gadag, famous for producing one of classical Indian music’s noblest performers, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, and a lively printing industry. 

Dad taught theology and related subjects to young Christian men and women from the surrounding areas. He regularly preached at outdoor revival meetings with his colleagues and students. Mom helped out wherever she was needed, sometimes as the bookkeeper for the college, sometimes she would join the pastors’ wives in their rural evangelizing campaigns but mostly she raised us kids.  

They had landed in Bombay after a long voyage across several oceans from New York in February 1952. They were appointed to join another American family, The Davises, who had two boys round about the same age as my two brothers, and a jolly, tubby spinster from Baltimore, Mary Ella Taylor. 

Mike my oldest brother was 5. Gregg, next up was 3. My sister Rebecca would arrive 3 years later, in 1955 and I brought up the rear in ‘57. There is a good case to be made that another sister was stillborn before I came along. 

We lived on the campus of the Karnataka Bible Seminary, whose red brick buildings dated back several decades. It was well shaded at least in the front part and served as a safe, walled but sprawling little world for me to explore as a kid.  

We were generally happy and normal. Among our subcultured circle of missionaries anyway. In fact, compared with the Davises,  mom and dad were liberal youngsters, which did cause ongoing friction between them over the years.  As is the wont of every child what they see in their homes they project onto the entire Universe.  There was nothing different about us. We all believed broadly the same things about the Bible and God and Jesus. We shared a barebone existence with few physical comforts. It was simple, filled with good food, devotions, trips to exotic places like the temples of Hampi, Shravanabelagola and the beaches of Karwar. Of course, “we” in these instances refers to other OMS missionaries or white folk in India more broadly.  

It was impossible not to notice that most everyone else around us and among us did not believe these things. But then, that was the whole point of our landing up in rural southern India. To try to get as many of them as possible to come over to our team.  A spiritual kabaddi match. 

Only recently have I begun to distance myself from the lived experience of my childhood. To look at it not from within but from a distance of 60 year; and from the outside. How did this rural, poor family from Minnesota end up in the villages of central India, speaking strange tongues and eating strange food? Why?  What was going on in India at the time? And how did being surrounded by religion and spirituality, in the home or everywhere you went in India, and speaking Kanarese simultaneously as fluidly as English and having Indian friends to whom I was closer than to my brothers who were away in boarding school?

What does /did this niche childhood-–Minnesota, Holiness Methodists, missionaries, newly Independent India, bilingual communication–influence who I am today?   

This is about that.  

India has been an indivisible aspect of my life since 10 July 1957. At times some have found it irritating and maddening.  Others have seen it as fascinating and exotic. Most just shrug, especially now in this tiny world we live in, in the 2020s.   

My connection to India is something I’ve always loved but haven’t known how to incorporate into my story. Or stories. It depended on the audience of course, as all stories do. My wives have felt threatened by India which is so easy to love in comparison with a real complex woman. So, there is shame and protection mixed in with my love of India. I’m sure many, including myself, thought I would outgrow my romantic childhood when I became an adult and that its influence would settle into a manageable and quaint curry now and then and perhaps one grand tour with the family when the kids are old enough to enjoy an adventure.  

But it hasn’t happened that way. The older I got the more attached and fascinated by and in love with the place I become.  I chose to study Hindi rather than Latin or French in high school. At the University of Minnesota, I jumped from majoring in Anthropology and Journalism and English before settling on South Asian Studies and History. I studied Urdu as well as Hindi. I spent a year after university studying in Lahore Pakistan. I was thinking of doing a PhD on one of the most important figures in modern South Asian Islam, Maulana Maududi. But then I got a job with the UN in Islamabad and began a career that took me around the world. India faded into the background for those years but never died.  

I began blogs about South Asian music and wrote a novel set in Pakistan. I read books on the caste system, Tamil anti-Brahmanism, Aurangzeb and the film industry, travelled and photographed across India whenever I could, did an ongoing deep dive into south Asian music and film and wrote a weekly column on the subject for an Indian online paper. I was asked to write a history of the Pakistani movie industry and now I’m thinking of leading tours to the sub-continent.   

India is not fading away like it was supposed to.  

Many of my kind (Missionary Kids from India and Pakistan) break into song when asked by Indians to explain ourselves.   

Mera juta hai Japani 

Yeh Patloon Englstani 

Sar pe lal topi Russi 

Phir bhi dil hai hindustani 

(I wear Japanese shoes and English trousers, The red hat on my head is Russian but still my heart is Indian)  

It’s a hackneyed trope but does capture the essence. 

My first blog I named, the Washerman’s Dog which is the English version of another famous Indian aphorism: na ghar ka na ghat ka, dhobi ka kuta (neither of the ghat nor the home, the washerman’s dog) 

Both sets of lyrics resonate with me. I do feel homeless in a way, neither from here nor there. But also completely blended in with India.  

Hence, it seems appropriate to name this column, My Desi Heart. A place where I’ll explore the story of my love-affair with the sub-continent.