travel – Page 2 – Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits

April 22, 2025May 6, 2025

Punch Houses to Parsi Theatre

Lollywood: stories of the Pakistani film industry

From Punch houses to Parsi Theatre

Though the early years of the East India Company are remembered in history as a time when hundreds of British men came to India and rapidly became very wealthy, life in a small up-country district was tough. Though the British public, to the extent they had time to care, resented the new ‘nabobs’ who returned home to England full of ill-gotten wealth and social swagger, relatively few servants of the company actually made fortunes. Many stayed on in India after their tours setting themselves up as indigo planters or scrounging for work in the big cities. For those not part of the elite ‘Covenanted Officer’ class which included most non-Indians, the Englishman’s daily round involved three essential things: work, avoiding illness and drink, with the last usually combined with the first two. Alcohol consumption was both a way to stay alive–especially since local water supplies were contaminated—and a way to pass the time. The highest rungs of British society had access to a variety of European wines, porters and spirits. The sailors, soldiers and planters, on the other hand, could mostly only afford locally brewed (and occasionally, deadly) concoctions that mixed ingredients like coconut spirits, chillis and opium.

Though the origin of its name is contended (does it refer to the 500 litre wooden barrel that held it, known as a ‘puncheon’ or to the Hindustani word, panch, for the number 5, the number of ingredients) punch was an alcoholic innovation invented in India by early European residents who wanted a lighter, sweeter drink than the local spirits or fiery rum. Experimentation found that by mixing rum or arrack, sugar, lemon/citrus juice, rosewater and spices in water a very tasty and potent beverage emerged. As early as the 1630s, Englishmen were writing home about this new drink they called ‘punch’. When the Company’s ships returned from India loaded with exotic luxuries, the ships’ crew and locals enjoyed evenings together drinking Punch on the docks. Though the many of the individual ingredients (lemons, nutmeg) were expensive in Britain, punch became ‘the tipple of choice for English aristocrats’ for the next hundred years and since then has become a regular offering at parties, weddings and even church potlucks across the English-speaking world.

In India, however, the grimy taverns where such alcoholic drinks were sold became known as punch houses. Not dissimilar to the famous jook joints in the southern United States, famous for their cheap booze and violence, punch houses were perfect venues for drinking binges, rowdy roughhousing, fisticuffs and whoring by bored sailors, down on their luck Europeans and soldiers. Indeed, one Englishman summarised the entertainment available for the British lower classes in India as amounting to “drinking hells, gambling hells or other hells.” For the upper-class elite, punch houses were a definite ‘no go’.

By the early decades of the 19^th century this public drunkenness and violence was so pervasive in the three colonial cities as well as smaller outposts across the country that the authorities grew increasingly alarmed at the damage such behaviour was doing to the image of European and Christian superiority. Serial campaigns were launched. Multiple strategies tested. Workhouses were built, as were insane asylums. Forced religious conversion was tried out, so too was jail time. None was very successful and the problem of European drunkenness remained forever an embarrassing black spot on the rulers publicly promoted sense of moral superiority.

Though alcohol abuse remained a problem among the British, over time the raw violence of the punch house gave way to other forms of entertainment. Musical evenings, card games and regularly scheduled visits to other European homes were popular among the ‘better’ classes. The rowdier types (i.e. drunken sailors high on Punch) were drawn to disrupting dramas and causing havoc at dramatic performance at a number of theatres that began to pop up across Bombay.

Bombay’s first theatre opened in 1776, situated on a space known as ‘The Green’ surrounded by other official buildings. The Bombay Theatre, as it was christened, catered to officials and their families and staged performances by amateur drama enthusiasts from among the European community. It experienced a difficult life through the early years of its existence and ultimately stood shuttered and unused for many. It was eventually bought by the city’s post prominent businessman, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi opium and shipping magnate, who never bothered to reopen it.

By the mid 1840s, the city was wealthy and large enough (thanks in large part to the illegal trade of opium smuggling) to demand better entertainment. Wealthy Indians, again mostly Parsis, championed theatre building as an important part of their civic duty which grew to include funding public charities, colleges and museums. The Grant Road Theatre opened on the northern edge of the city in 1846, at the time, quite a distance from the Fort area inhabited by the elites of the Company. Though opened with an eye on that market few English found the prospect of travelling into underdeveloped outer suburbs, where hygiene and other surprises lay in wait, attractive. Very quickly the financiers opened the halls to local artists who staged plays in Bombay’s most widely spoken languages, Gujarati, Urdu and Hindi.

Somnath Gupt, who wrote a history of Parsi theatre summed up the transition this way. “As long as it was patronized by the governor and high-level officials, the theatre was frequented by people of good family. Because of the location on Grant Road, however, their attendance decreased. Some Christian preachers also opposed the theatre as depraved and immoral. The Oriental Christian Spectator was chief among those newspapers that wrote in opposition to Hindu drama. In consequence, the theatre was attended by sailors from trading ships, soldiers and traders. A low class public came and made the theatre foul-smelling with their smoking. The performances began to start late, and etiquette deteriorated. Drunken sailors and soldiers behaved rudely with the women. It began to be necessary to bring in the police to keep order. This audience was…inherited by the Parsi theatre.”[1]

The Grant Road Theatre hosted international troupes enroute to and from Australia when they showed up but the 1850s saw Parsi-owned theatrical troupes mushroom to fill the supply of plays, actors and audiences. Based on the European proscenium-style theatre that featured a huge arch over the stage as a frame for the action, the Parsis saw the theatre as a way to both entertain and educate Bombay’s growing middle class.

What quickly became known as Parsi theatre was an instant hit. The plays set the imagination of Bombay-ites on fire. Many of the plays were wildly popular, running to packed houses night after night for years on end. A whole new class of Parsi actors, playwrights, directors, composers and producers grew up, many of whom moved seamlessly into the film world in the early 20^th century. Many companies toured the countryside, not just around Bombay but to far flung parts of the interior and even to places as far away as Sumatra, Malaya, Burma and Ceylon. Drawing on local talent and tales from Hindu, Islamic and Persian epics, Parsi theatre became a uniquely Indian and lively form of entertainment many aspects of which—song, dance, bawdy humor, melodrama—were directly absorbed by the subcontinent’s early film makers.

Along with the companies and cohort of professional players, more theatres were built with names like the Elphinstone, Gaiety, Novelty and Tivoli. The staging of dramas was by the 1870s and 80s a huge part of Bombay’s entertainment scene. Jamshedji Framji Madan “the Parsi actor-turned-wine merchant-turned owner of the largest chain of theatres and cinemas in India in the first three decades of the 20th century”[2] exemplifies the central role the Parsi community played not just in whetting the Indian appetite for staged comedic and dramatic entertainment in purpose built buildings, but of leading the transition from Parsi Theatre to what would become one of the most consequential film industries the world has ever seen.

Madan started his career in the theatre first as an actor but he made a considerable fortune in y securing large contracts to provision British troops with the wine that the governing classes so condemned for corrupting Her Majesty’s troops. Sensing greater opportunities in the capital of British India, Calcutta, and loaded with money from his wine-provisioning business, Madan in 1902 set up a diversified business group, J.F Madan & Co., with interests in everything from insurance to film equipment and real estate. He also began buying up Calcutta theatres (the Alfred and the Corinthian) where playwrights including Agha Hashr Kashmiri, aka India’s Shakespeare, plied their trade. Kashmiri, though from Banaras, moved to Lahore in his later years where he also wrote for films, an early example of the cross fertilisation of cinematic talent between India and what would soon become Pakistan.

Immediately after arriving in Calcutta, he set up the “Elphinstone Bioscope Company and began showing films in tents on the Maidan before opening the first dedicated movie house in Calcutta, the Elphinstone Picture Palace.”[3] The venue not only was Calcutta’s and India’s first dedicated movie hall but marked the beginning of India’s first cinema hall chain. In 1917 his company, Far Eastern Films, partnered with Maurice Bandman, an American entertainment magnate based in Calcutta to distribute foreign films in India. “In 1917 his company Madan’s Far Eastern Films joined forces with Bandmann to form the Excelsior Cinematograph Syndicate dedicated to distributing films as well as owning and managing a chain of cinemas. In 1919 Madan, like Bandmann, floated a public company, Madan Theatres Ltd, which incorporated the other companies. It was this company that formed the basis of the remarkable growth of the Madan empire.” Madan’s multiple interests in theatre and commerce led him to producing his own films, including the first commercial length feature in Bengali, Bilwamangal (1918).

Title page of a programme of the Empire Theatre Calcutta, the headquarters of Maurice Bandman’s theatrical company and his touring circuit. It was modelled on the Gaiety Theatre in London.

Madan’s strong commercial eye recognized that the medium would need its own venues and screening halls, rather than relying on established theatres. By 1919 the Madan Theatres Limited was in business and set to become India’s largest integrated film production-distribution-exhibition company with assets located not just across India but in Ceylon and Burma as well. Madan issued shares that generated Rs. 10 million and through effective management practices was able to procure a huge number of theatres across South and SE Asia. Though film making was picking up steam in India, the vast majority of films shown were foreign. In 1926 only 15% of films were Indian. 85% were foreign, mostly American, movies. By partnering with the French company Pathé Madan’s theatres were to a significant degree responsible for creating an audience for American and European films in India by importing and screening Hollywood films, such as the Perils of Pauline, The Mark of Zorro and Quo Vadis.

By the mid-1920s Madan controlled half of all revenues from the Indian box office and owned 127 movie houses. His hiring of foreign directors such as the Italian, Eugenio De Liguoro who directed 6 films for Madan Theatres, gave many of his films a sheen of expertise and craft that was not yet visible within local ranks. In essence, Madan had monopolised India’s nascent film industry.

The Lumiere brothers may not have understood the commercial viability of their inventions but it seemed that many Indians did. The great colonial cities of Bombay and Calcutta both quadrupled in size between 1850 and 1900 to be home for nearly 1 million people. Bombay and Calcutta were now world cities. It was not surprising that this most modern and hypnotic of new technologies would catch on in places like this. But Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were not alone. Far to the West, on the far frontier of British India another city was starting to make waves in the movie world too.

[1] Hansen, Kathryn. (Translator) 2001, “The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (Pt 2).Pdf.”

[2] Balme, Christopher. 2015. “Managing Theatre and Cinema in Colonial India: Maurice E. Bandmann, J.F. Madan and the War Films’ Controversy.” Popular Entertainment Studies 6: 6–21.

[3] Ibid.

April 18, 2025May 6, 2025

Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s unlikely film industry

Scenes from never-made Pakistani films [Number 1]

Film: Tabahi (Annihilation)

Released: June & July 1947

Starring: al Nasir, Vinod & Roop Kishore Shorey

A man stands by the side of the road staring into the smouldering skeleton of a large double storied building. He covers his nose with a blue silk handkerchief to keep the noxious, semi-sweet smell of burning nitrate at bay. The lenses of his round rimmed glasses reflect the flames that leap from room to room.

The camera pans back for a super wide shot and reveals behind him the apocalypse that everyone had been praying would never come playing out. The citizens of Lahore are moving hurriedly and fearfully towards the railway station. For once no one argues with the tonga walas who are demanding Rs100 to make the short journey. Bloated groups of people–women and children in the middle; wild-eyed men armed with swords, pistols, axes and lathis on the perimeters–move deliberately towards neighbourhoods where their co-religionists might give them safety. Hindus to Nisbet and Chamberlain Roads. Muslims to Mozang and Icchra. Sikhs want to make Amritsar or Delhi.

To the north, old Lahore is an inferno. The once rich markets and havelis of Shahalmi, one of Lahore’s mighty 13 gates is no more. Gangsters and politicians had banded together two days previous to raze the historic mohalla to the ground, killing hundreds of mostly Hindus. War chants echo in waves as lorries race by loaded with enraged men. “Khoon se lenge Pakistan!” “Har Har Mahadev.” For weeks the citizens of Punjab’s greatest city have heard that goondas from Amritsar have snuck into town to mock and shame their Muslim brothers to cleanse the city of all kafir. In response the Sikh leaders have mobilised their small armies of jathas in an all out war of revenge. Everyone knows that even the Lahore Relief Committee set up by some prominent Hindus is just a front for RSS militants more concerned with smuggling weapons to their frightened people than offering relief any sort of relief.

The days are unbearable. The early summer heat has maded the tar on the roads gooey. With the fires and explosions all across the city the temperature has never risen so high. Perhaps when the rains come all this madness with come to an end?

The staring man goes by the name of Roop Kishore Shorey. He turns away and falls into the backseat of an American sedan that has been idling for him. Inside an anxious driver guns the car down the road and yells out “Where to sahib? Lahore is no longer safe.”

Shorey doesn’t answer. Next to him fidgeting anxiously sits his friend, the music director Vinod, who just a few months earlier had completed his first score for the movie Khamosh Nigahein at the now destroyed Shorey Studio. Vinod shouts for the driver to turn the car, which was headed north toward the city and railway station, to the south. ‘Go to Walton Air field.’

At the airport the pair find Al Nasir, the debonair hero and recently licensed pilot, readying his tiny single prop plane for takeoff. “You know, I only have room for one of you,” Al Nasir says merrily, seemingly oblivious to the carnage in the city.

“Take him.” Vinod pushes a nearly catatonic Shorey forward. “I’ve got a family to worry about.”

“Thirty-four and still a bachelor! Who can believe it,” laughs Al Nasir. Sex and women were essential parts of the actor’s life. He’d just divorced the beautiful Meena and was now hot in pursuit of a number of other starlets in Lahore and Bombay.

Shorey embraces Vinod seemingly unwilling to let him go, but the music director untangles himself. “I’ll follow you soon. I’ll find you, don’t worry. My family must think I’m dead, I have to go.”

Vinod runs back to the car which speeds off toward the city.

Al Nasir gets in beside Shorey and notices that the producer’s normally pristine white shirt is grey with dust and ash. Sweat and tears have muddied the lenses of his expensive German spectacles. He smiles grimly at his friend and without waiting for approval from the tower taxis down the runway. Lifting off, the plane circles and climbs steadily through the heavy, smoky air. Shorey stares out of the window. The city of his birth, the city he loved, the city he was so determined would one day be as famous for its movies as Bombay, is now a medieval battleground. Fires, pillars of black smoke and crumbled buildings everywhere. Around the railway station a mini city has grown up. He can hear gun shots, There are army trucks at every chowk.

‘We’ll be back,’ Al Nasir, calls out. He’s still smiling. “Nehru and Jinnah and Gandhi will sort it out. This is Lahore after all. Let them call it Pakistan. It’s still India. In a few weeks everyone will get tired of blood and bombs and the public will want to see our movies and have fun again.”

The plane climbs higher and disappears into a dark grey cloud.

April 15, 2025May 6, 2025

World Muzak [not]

There is an ultra-thin niche in the Ameri-Euro music business that is best described as ‘world fusion’. Colourful, mostly upbeat music, played by globalised musical combos or artists that draw on all manner of culture and creeds for their musical inspiration and membership. Indian wedding bands alongside southern funk outfits. Spanish flamenco coloured by qawwali. Politically-charged West African hard rock. Reggae played by Mexicans. Indian ragas recreated in a bluegrass style.

I actually don’t know, but as a rusted-on fan of this sort of music, I would suspect this sub-sub-no-genre is not huge. Certainly not in Australia and the States, the two Western countries I think I know the best. Even in the home countries of many of the performers of this music, their following is tiny compared to hip-hop, J or K pop or the dozens of local musical styles. It is a hybrid music which can seem to the casual listener to be contrived. Forced rather than natural. A sort of international muzak for weirdos. Exactly the sort of thing missionaries, mercenaries and misfits would love. Among my own circle of friends, few, I reckon, would echo my pro-‘world fusion’ sentiments.

I’ve not spent time reflecting on who the ‘ideal market’ segment for this music might be, but fans seem to be generally well-read musically and well-travelled in life. Immigrants, refugees, aid workers, guestworkers, academics, third culture kids, diplomats and children of missionaries, such as myself. World fusion lovers usually have some significant personal or emotional connection with WF’s endless, restless creativity.

I find this musical omnium gatherum–corny as a lot of it sounds to the vast majority of music listeners–as essential to my comfort zone as shag carpet was to our homes in 1972. I may not listen to it every day but I could never not enjoy listening to it.

I was born and lived most of my pre-University years in India. I’ve had the unbelievable privilege of working as an ‘aid-worker’ in every continent bar Antarctica and South America. Though I didn’t seriously listen to and pay attention to the ‘world music’ that I had been exposed to, be it an all-night Ravi Shankar concert in Delhi or the soukous bubbling out of every taxi in Nairobi until I began blogging in 2010, I have always enjoyed keeping my ears open to the music of wherever I happened to be at any given moment.

I’m not interested in defending or attacking the marketing category known as ‘world music’, one of the more pointless ways to spend time. I’m not in any position to write a ‘history’ of world music if even such a history could be written. What I am interested in exploring is why I so love ‘world fusion’.

World music is arguably the loosest, broadest and most inclusive genre out there. I mean, it’s music. From the world. The usual line in the sand that it must be from non-English speaking countries/artists, has always been misleading. Taj Mahal, to cite just one quick example, is as much a world music artist (starting with his very nom du chanteur) as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. If you doubt me, check out Mkutano or Music Fuh Ya’ (Musica Para Tu) only two of his several ‘world fusion’ discs.

The much-loved Reddit debates about breaking music into sub and sub-sub categories is the second most pointless debate. Spotify the evident source of all important musical data has come up with a list of over 1300 genres from #1 A Cappella to #1383 Zydeco. It’s hilarious but kind of useful. There are those, like my nephew, who eschew noting any genres in their music collections. I empathise with that policy but find some sort of labelling is essential for me to keep track of a sprawling digital music hoard. I generally cram everything into one of two dozen genres and forget about it. But I’m wandering here.

On Spotify’s master genre list, just barely holding on by its fingernails at #1370, is a genre they call ‘world fusion’. And that’s what I’m on about here.

I have no idea how ‘world fusion’ is actually defined by the Scandihooligans as I don’t have a sub to Spotify, but I would guess it would include everything from spa music to Buddha Bar and not much else.

Here’s my definition.

World fusion music is a style, performed primarily by groups rather than individuals, that consciously mixes musical traditions, instruments, languages, singing styles from one or more cultural/musical traditions. The purpose is exploratory, adventure-seeking and overlaid with what these days would count as a ‘woke’ ethos; i.e. there is often a deliberate message of the unity of all humans and equal value to all of our cultures; a conviction that playing music with our politically identified enemies is actually a really good way to create some safe spaces in this world. And as such, WF is a threat to the ever more popular “my country is the best” version of nationalism that is spreading across our weary planet. And to that extent, please call me ‘woke’.

Corny? Self deluded? Perhaps, but it’s the music I’m interested in not the political commentary.

In this category are bands like The Kronos Quartet, Tabla Beat Science, Hindugrass, Abrasaz, Bansal Trio, Ifriqiyya Électrique, Bustan Abraham and hundreds more. Bands that freely experiment with blending bluegrass with ragas, rock ‘n’ roll with North African gnawa, Western classical with jazzy Hindustani violin, oud and sitar, jazz and Carnatic horn blowing.

I love this music. It not only reminds me of places, experiences and people I’ve met, worked and lived with over the past 35 years but it keeps me connected to the world. In diminished circumstances, it allows me to travel the world. It is hopeful music in that if global cooperation, respect and decency are not politically palatable at least WF musicians are keeping these things alive notionally. Which is critical in our destructive times. World fusion simultaneously connects my personal story with a once and future state of mind. It is an almost invisible way to Resist.

On a more mundane plain ‘WF’ inspires me to dig into a particular instrument (kamancheh; duduk) which often leads to learning about musical movements in which some of the artists or bands participated. It helps me appreciate what a particular music scene was like in a particular country at a particular moment (pre-Revolutionary Iran; 1980s Somalia). All of which feeds back into my understanding and appreciation of the many places I’ve lived and visited. The music adds tonal depth, colour and additional realities to places like Angola and Afghanistan which during my sojourns there were understood almost entirely in political or humanitarian terms.

While some of the musical blends WF comes up with (bluegrass with Hindustani classical?) can seem contrived or dead-upon arrival, many times it works far better than you can imagine. As I listen more and more to this music I marvel at how natural and organic it sounds. It turns out the tabla is one of the most versatile and expressive drums ever invented; it sounds good almost anywhere. The oud of Araby has a strong resemblance to the lute of Europe and both pair well with sitar. The Afghan rubab is fucking exhilarating when used as a lead guitar. Bansuri, the Indian bamboo flute, is another instrument that seems universally suited to almost any other strain of music.

World fusion can slip into dinner background music. It’s generally very melodic and interesting rhythmically. Maybe too much like smooth jazz for some ears. I for one don’t mind pleasant music playing in the background when I’m cooking or paying the bills or chatting over chocolate pudding. Much as I love soft rock, chill-out, lo-fi or Top 40. In the right context anything can do the trick.

But when I pay attention, the better bands or groups amaze me with their inventiveness. Such as the group Abrasaz, a Germany-based collective with members from Austria, Turkey, Singapore and Japan. A true ‘world fusion’ outfit who came together to release a single album, Biraminket, in 2008.

There is a strong South Asian atmosphere here with Ravi Srinivasan’s tabla featuring prominently throughout, especially on the opening track in which a racing pattern of drums and steady, plucked bass line (Akira Ando) set the stage for an intense musical hymn to Maya Wati, the mother of illusion and magic. Paul Schwingenschlögl’s trumpet/flügelhorn keeps the feel edgy and like Srinivasan’s drumming is the other magical part of this record.

On Samraat, Srinivasan, in addition to keeping the beat going, joins Mustafa el Dino in vocalising lines of one of South Asia’s great qawwalis, Shams-ud-duhaa Badr-ud-dujaa Teri Bari Tauqir Hai, which switches over to jazz scatting while Schwingenschlögl solos on flügelhorn.

Lhasa opens with a lovely piano alaap played by Schwingenschlögl which then he turns into an equally beautiful semi-ballad. Pentagram introduces the Kashmiri dulcimer (santoor) played by Srinivasan, whose slivery-steely tones immediately move us to a dream-like plain. The flügelhorn alternates between drone and improv.

Though Indian/Pakistani themes and titles abound, none of the performers is actually from those countries. Yet they have been able to build on that platform to explore the limits of their instruments and voices in interesting directions. Purists of all types would find much to be offended here and sometimes it does seem that things are being thrown against the wall to see if the spaghetti sticks. For me that is what makes this album so endlessly entertaining. Because they owe no professional loyalty to qawwali or khayal they are able to approach each as a discrete musical element that can be tested to see if it fits. Thus, scatting against the Indian musical scale or picking out a line or two of a traditional much more famous piece, means they can connect to both European and Indian ears. The sound is familiar enough to both but neither pure jazz nor Indian. Or anything else. Oiwake, based on a much-loved Japanese folk song, allows Ando to foreground his bass before singing inspired by khayal soars above the driving rhythm, ultimately creating a twirling dervish chant. The transition is as seamless and satisfying as George Harrison’s ‘hallelujah’ to ‘Hare Krisna’ chorus on My Sweet Lord.

If there is one thing that I wish I could change it would be highlighting more of the saz, the only stringed instrument featured here. The saz, like its cousin the bouzouki, is suited to both rhythm and solo and always adds excitement to the proceedings. Unfortunately, it is heard far too little here but has a nice turn on Kalbimiz Bir and Abraxis II.

An album that will be your friend forever.

March 5, 2025May 6, 2025

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 6^th 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.

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.

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

March 4, 2025May 6, 2025

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 18^th 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).

March 3, 2025May 6, 2025

My Missionary Family: Part 1

There is no generic missionary. There is no single description that all missionaries would agree on. Missionaries were/are as diverse as any other group of humans. They had a variety of motivations for being in India, vastly differing theologies and lifestyles. Many didn’t like each other, even when they worked for the same ‘mission board’. Some were world class historians and biologists and linguists. Some developed new nutritious products for the emerging middle class. Some led the world in the treatment of blindness and leprosy. Some ‘went native’. Others went mad and had to be shipped back to Ohio. Some believed every word of the Bible was historically accurate and spiritually true. Others could not find their way to 2 Chronicles. One even became a leading White Supremacist.

What follows is what my missionary world looked like.

My parents came to India in 1952. Dad was 27. Mom 30. Dad had been appointed by ‘the Mission’ to teach in a small Bible college in a not-very-significant district town in what was then Bombay Province but which, in 1956, was included within the freshly minted Mysore State that was renamed again in 1973 as Karnataka State.

Home for both Mom and Dad was the upper Midwest: Minnesota and the Dakotas. Both families were of German extract and both were equally poor. And both families belonged to the ultra-small, ultra-conservative Holiness Methodist denomination.

Mom was older than Dad by three years. She had grown up a farmer’s daughter and harbored the suspicion that she was an ‘afterthought’. She always claimed to have enjoyed a loving childhood but one that was lonely and isolated. Her siblings were 10-15 years older and the farms she grew up on, first outside the northern Minnesota town of Detroit Lakes and later near Paynesville, in Stearns Country–heavy German immigrant territory– were several miles from civilisation. She loved (and dreamed of) sharp clothes, baking and reading.

Going on to High School was a major aspiration for most of her social network. Though her father lost his farm in Detroit Lakes during the early days of the Depression, forcing him to become a sharecropping dirt farmer, mom did graduate high school and went on to Business College in Minneapolis just as WWII began. She admitted to having a few boys from the community make eyes at her, even a few handsome lads, but she never made eyes back. Mainly because it was clear to her that they had no desire to go to High School. Or they smoked. Had no real prospects. One boy, however, did stand out–Melvin Finger. She liked the look of him and noted with approval that he was ‘serious-minded and read TIME magazine’.

She grew up loved, she said. She also said, she felt as if her mother, a devout and extremely soft-spoken woman, had hoped she would be a boy because she confessed to hoping that her final child would be a ‘preacher or missionary’. To mom, these were clear signals that she had disappointed her mother by being a woman. I think she carried that feeling of being ‘second best’ with her throughout life.

Her dad, a tall and toothless man with a hearty laugh and a 19^th century outlook, was not particularly religious. He’d go to church occasionally but did nothing to encourage Christian faith in his children. That was their mother’s role. He was too busy scraping enough sustenance together from the tiny Minnesota plots he farmed.

Her upbringing was stifling. Though she accepted the conservative Christian values and faith of her family and neighbors she knew early on that she needed to escape rural Minnesota. In later years she would cackle over the thought of her being a Minnesota farmer’s wife, something that bemused and terrified her. When a recruiter from Minneapolis Business College laid out brochures of a nine-month secretarial course in the Big Smoke, she didn’t hesitate. Minneapolis was a ‘magical city’ for her. Shops full of wonderful dresses and shoes and a place where she could be surrounded by people but still keep to herself.

In their memoir Mom wrote:

Though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do or be, I was SURE I did not want to spend my life on a farm! Dad and mom had worked their fingers to the bone for years, and what did they have to show for it? I wanted to have a nice home and some stylish clothes—admittedly I was ‘materially’ minded. Attending business college offered me a way out of Paynesville and an escape from the farm. What could be better? I was excited!

Dad’s family were more recent German immigrants. Grandpa had arrived with his mother and siblings from what is now western Poland in 1903. They settled in Guelph, North Dakota, a speck on the prairie not too far from the South Dakota border. The Great Northern Railway that linked St. Paul with Seattle in far west Washington State ran through Guelph and provided jobs for grandpa and his brother Julius. But the hard physical labor didn’t do it for Grandpa, Rudolph Senior, who was still a couple years shy of fifteen. Around that time he was dragged to a ‘revival meeting’, had a spiritual conversion and dedicated himself to ‘full time Christian ministry’. He committed himself to a Holiness theology, serving as a preacher (who often had to move from parish to parish filling in for small rural communities) and eventually General Secretary of the denomination. Here’s how Dad summed him up in the memoir he wrote with Mom in 2011.

The Holiness Methodists were a small, struggling denomination with never more than 30-35 churches and preaching points. But they established a small Bible school (Holiness Methodist School of Theology) in Minneapolis. A year or so after his conversion. Rudolph felt God was calling him to the ministry, so went to Minneapolis and enrolled at HMST. After just a year’s study, the church assigned him as a pioneering evangelist to a remote area way out in northern Montana.

For a year and a half—April 1915 to October 1916—he lived in a small mountain cabin in close proximity to the Pinkham Creek and Fortine lumber camps located a few miles from the town of Eureka. Life in those Rocky Mountain woods was primitive, ultra simple, far from being as romantic as one might think.

He married a feisty woman named Leona and together produced a large family of 9 children of which Dad was number four. Grandpa struggled with depression throughout his life (Dad brushed it aside as nothing more than ‘the winter blues’) which is probably one of the reasons he returned to Minneapolis and HMST. The family could barely put food on the table, especially as Rudolph Senior’s body began to break down with the stress of scraping a living together in the Depression.

Dad spent most of his youth moving between small towns in South Dakota and Minnesota before completing his high school in Duluth. Like his soon-to-be girlfriend, Eleanore Naugle, that older, lonesome, beautiful farm girl he met at the annual Watson Camp Meeting, Dad knew from a young age that he had to escape this small, loving but culturally isolated world of poor Midwestern farmers and laborers for something more hopeful and spacious.

Both Mom and Dad spoke fondly of the annual Holiness camp meetings they attended in the tiny Christian enclave of Watson (pop. 290) in south central Chippewa County. A regular feature of rural American Christianity, the camp meeting tradition had its roots in the so-called Second Great Awakening of the late 18^th century. The meetings were ten days of hallelujahs, hymns, fire and brimstone preaching and sanctification under a tent in the woods. They were an opportunity for socially isolated people to meet their co-religionists and for preachers and hucksters to reach tens of thousands of people in one place. And as ever, camp meetings were places for young people to meet up, fall in love and probably do all sorts of unsanctified and sinful things like smooching.

[Listen to Brother Claude Ely singing at a camp meeting ca. late 1940s]

Dad’s favorite part of the meetings were the sermons of visiting missionaries who told stories of the exotic, colorful and spiritually benighted Hindoos and Mohammadans of India.

In 1946, now married to Mom, they once more attended the Watson camp meetings.

There, the camp’s missionary speaker was…China missionary Roland [Rollie] Rice…. I had been thinking quite a bit about India during our last months in Fort Robinson, remarking more than once that I had wished the army had sent me there instead of one of my Camp Dodge buddies. This friend, Carl, and I corresponded during our Fort time. In one letter he was complaining about some of India’s negatives and wrote ‘You’d be crazy Rabe, to ever want to come to this place!’

My interest in India had been kindled years earlier and only kept growing. The stories of India that Rev. F.B. Whistler told [in previous years at Watson camp] had ignited that early-on ‘India interest’. That interest was reinforced (admittedly in a fanciful way) through reading about the country—particularly in the adventure books of Richard Halliburton who wrote about snake charmers, tiger hunting, maharajas with jewel encrusted turbans and other exotic minutia. In one of those ‘I plan to be’ talks in a Denfield high school class, I informed my classmates I planned to join the US Foreign Service. Around that time I also made up a fictitious address in Bombay, gave it to my mother saying, ‘Some day you will be writing to me in Bombay where I’ll be serving as US Ambassador or as some officer for the US Government.’ She smiled and said, ‘Yes, Rudy, I think I’ll be writing to you in India one day, but you’ll be there as an Ambassador for Jesus Christ, not the US government.’ I always thought it interesting that 10 years later when we got to India, our first mailing address included the name Bombay: Gadag, Dharwar District, Bombay Presidency.

And so it became family history. Dad was the one who had been inspired to be a missionary as a young boy. Eleanore fell in love with him and ‘accepted as part of the deal’ that her commitment to him meant a life far from her family in what must have seemed to her a hostile and harsh environment on the other side of the world.

But re-reading their joint memoir, I have a much stronger sense of Mom’s agency in this. She knew exactly who she was marrying. Rudy had many of the qualities she admitted to liking in men. He was a Christian. He was good looking. He didn’t smoke or drink. He was ‘serious minded and read TIME magazine’ like one of her early crushes Melvin Finger did. And like him she shared a desire to get away from the stifling atmosphere of rural Minnesota and have a bit of adventure. And similar to Dad, her mother had already committed her last child to God to be one of His missionaries.

On the last night of 1946 camp, Dad and Mom both publicly declared their desire to move to India to ‘serve the Lord’.

The reality, in fact, seems to be, contrary to family oral history, that a career in India was something they both consciously chose. Maybe Dad’s interest in the country was deeper and more longstanding than Mom’s, who probably had zero curiosity about the place, but both of them were excited about the prospect of leaving America in search of adventure and souls to save.

Years later after attending her high school class’s 50^th reunion she commented with obvious, if well-controlled glee: “Although I had been such a shy and unassuming little girl, I probably traveled farther and had a more exciting life than most anyone else. It’s safe to say that Rudy, the man I married, was the secret of my out-of-the-ordinary’ life.”

February 28, 2025May 6, 2025

Gene Moles: Bakersfield’s Secret Weapon

GENEM

February 17, 2025May 6, 2025

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.

February 14, 2025May 6, 2025

Running Home (Pt.3)

My bodyguards followed their orders and allowed no one to talk to me. Including themselves. From Hardwar to Lucknow, a journey of 15 hours, they kept their prisoners on a tight leash, taking turns at dozing, sometimes whispering, occasionally sharing bidis. Up on the top tier, I was left alone. Neither uttered a word to me.

When the train pulled into Lucknow, our party clanged and shuffled its way across a platform or two until one of the cops pointed at a train. “That one will take you to Pratapgarh,” he said.

With their duty done, they turned their detainees around once more and left me to my own devices.

An empty train in India is a rare thing. The one I boarded was oven hot and completely quiet. I had the feeling of entering a long steel church. There was a similar air of hope and faith that the train would soon start moving. A handful of passengers lay stretched out here and there, prostrate before the Sun god. I found a window seat on the shady side of the compartment and waited.

Eventually, the train did pull away from the station and onto the dry, scrabbly plain of central UP. I squinted into the wavy horizon. Though it must have been close to 45 degrees, I relished the way the heat burned the monsoon chill out of my bones.

The slow swaying and jolting of the carriages comforted me. I lost myself in the clacking of the rails. I was excited now. Just a couple more hours to go and I’d be home.

I must have nodded off for I was woken by someone tapping my shoulder. In front of me stood a Sikh ticket inspector in a navy blue blazer with worn cuffs. He had his hand outstretched and asked me to show him my ticket.

“I don’t have one.”

Perhaps because a representative of the Indian government itself had deposited me, Special Delivery, on this train my fear was gone.

‘Why?”

“My money was stolen and the Railway Police told me to take this train. My mother is sick in Allahabad and I’m going there.” The further I travelled the longer my opening line became.

The Ticket Inspector eyed me quietly for a minute. As he did, my courage wilted. The same panic I had felt after the Russians had laughed me out of the compound, rushed through me. I was sure the moment of my arrest had arrived.

“You do one thing,” he said after a while. “Just before we enter Pratapgarh Station, the train will stop. You alight there and walk to the city. There will be no issue of ticket-shicket.”

I nodded my assent somewhat incredulously. How was it that a man charged with enforcing the rules was advising me on the best way to break them?

Several minutes later the train did roll to a stop about 200 metres from the station. I, along with what seemed like every other passenger on the train, hopped onto the hot earth and scampered out of the railway premises through a hole in a symbolic fence standing bent and rusty 5 metres from the highway.

I’ll never forget that sardarji.

Pratapgarh is a small district town famous for not much. Its main role is as a rail junction and transport hub. I entered a chowk bustling with activity. People were streaming up and down the road toward the station. Buses and Tempos, India’s awkward three wheeler taxis that ferried people to remote villages off the main highway, stood three deep on both sides of the road.

Touts shouted out destinations of nearby towns and villages. Hawkers shouted the prices of their fruit and peanuts. Horns blasted incessantly. Loudspeakers attached to trees blasted Lata Mangeshkar and Rafi songs.

“Illaahabad, Illaahabad. Illahabaaad! Hey kid, why not go with us?”

A man with sweat dripping from his nose and ears and with a soiled handkerchief around his neck motioned me in his direction.

He was standing by a taxi. I couldn’t afford a taxi. I was looking for a bus. I couldn’t afford a bus either but somehow catching a free ride on the latter seemed more feasible than in a taxi.

‘Where you going?”

“Allahabad.”

“Come on. I have one seat left, Rs. 12 is all. Come on, quickly, right over here.”

He pulled me towards the Ambassador.

“I don’t have 12 rupees.”

“No problem, how much do you have?”

“None. But if you stop on Stanley Rd, across from Beli Hospital I can get you some.”

“Done,” he said. “Sit down, here.”

He pulled open a creaky door and shoved me into the back seat. I joined five other adults. Across their laps they carried a charpai, a country rope-bed that had been partially disassembled to fit into the auto. None of them could move from the weight of the wooden legs and the tangle of rope. I squeezed in as best I could, holding the door shut with my arm.

In the front seat sat another four adults. Not one of them was the driver. With his taxi now full the driver began to insinuate himself little by little behind the wheel. After some wiggling and numerous requests for reconfigurations in the passenger’s sitting arrangements, he was able to reach both feet to the pedals. His back was mostly resting against the front door which caused him to maneuver the wheel with distinct awkwardness. As if he was puppet with broken arms.

Somehow, by stretching and nudging the gear shift with the very tips of his fingers, the driver got us rolling down the highway. Inconceivably, in every little bazaar we passed through he shouted out loudly, “Illahabad. Kacheri chowk savari. Jaldi aa!” as if he were the only one in the car. Luckily, no one took up his offer and an hour and a half later just as the hottest sun of the day was turning into cool evening, we stopped in front of Allahabad Bible Seminary.

Before I managed to tell the driver to wait while I got Rs 12 from my parents, the car lurched and sputtered down the Grand Trunk Road.

48 hours after leaving Mussoorie I walked into the shady compound of home.

My parents were expecting me. Mr. Kapadia had called to inform them that while the school didn’t know my exact whereabouts, “I suspect he’s on his way to you.”

I spent a week at home. When my folks grilled me about what had caused me to take such a drastic step I didn’t know what to say. For the entire journey I had operated on the principle of forward motion. I didn’t doubt my feeling that I needed to be home and had spent no time analyzing why I had bolted.

I had no words to express the oppression I felt inside. The monsoon, the mist, the mountains, the Bible Club, the school, the cold had all worked to make me feel agitated and disconnected. Out of sorts.

My sister Beckie had graduated that summer and gone to the States for college. I was the last of my siblings, so perhaps I felt alone and vulnerable. Without an older brother or sister as a reference point boarding school seemed more scary and hostile. All I knew for sure was that I had an overwhelming but inarticulate need for home.

After a week my dad put me back on the train. “We told Mr Kapadia that he has our agreement to punish you in whatever manner the school decides.”

It was matter-of-fact statement. I didn’t care. My inner battery was recharged.

When I got back to Mussoorie I felt strong and connected. And heroic. People that I had admired or been intimidated by looked at me in awe. “Rabe, you actually ran away! Far out!”

I don’t know if anyone followed my example but for a brief moment I considered myself a trailblazer.

Mr Kapadia informed me that I would be gated for 10 days. No extra curricular activity and straight home after school. I was to serve my sentence in the home of the Harpers, whose son Phil, was a classmate. Mrs Harper, a vivacious, larger-than-life, extremely liberal minded woman welcomed me with love, a no-nonsense attitude and French Toast for breakfast.

“If you ever want to run away again,” Mr Kapadia told me when it was all said and done, “just come to me. We’ll have a talk. If you want a cigarette I’ll let you smoke in my house. Just don’t frighten everyone by disappearing!”

February 12, 2025May 6, 2025

Running Home (Pt. 2)

The Russians were easy to find. I heard their tipsy, vodka-soaked laughter coming from a shady part of the compound. Four or five of them were sitting on adjacent porches of their apartments, their fleshy faces flushed red with heat and drink.

As I approached, silence fell.

I smiled, hoping it would break the ice. It didn’t.

They stared at me, obviously perplexed and irritated that I had interrupted their lunch break. One of the women whispered something to her friend.

“Excuse me,” I began.

By now I had my tale-of-woe down pat. I told them my mother was ill and I needed some money. “I need to get to Allahabad, about 700 kilometers from here,”

“No. No money,” one of them said.

A couple others joined in the chorus. “No money. Go away.” A man with huge arms and angry eyes said it louder than the others. With real authority.

Having spent 8 years in boarding school I knew a lost cause when I met one. I turned back toward the gate.

But I was dying of thirst. With a drinking gesture I said, “Could I have some water?”

This second request really set them off. Amidst the general clamor of, “No water. Go!’, one of the men made a move towards me. He didn’t follow me but I didn’t have a the courage to turn back and check until I was several meters down the path I had come up just a couple minutes earlier. When I did turn they were still tense. They glared at me but as I retreated the laughing resumed.

A mali was sitting in the shade on his haunches watering a guava tree. He beckoned me over.

He held up the hose for me to drink. He didn’t say much and I didn’t offer anything. I have no doubt he had been watching the scene play out from a distance. I sensed it was one he himself was familiar with. I took his kindness as an act of solidarity.

The thought of a 10 km ride back to Hardwar in the midday sun depressed me, especially as I was no richer for my effort. I was too spent to formulate my next move, but I knew I needed to be in town where there existed at least the potential of assistance.

I must have looked miserable pedaling along the highway because out of nowhere a man appeared. He had well oiled, wavy hair that glistened in the sun. He wore narrow legged pants and a plaid yellow shirt. I can’t remember how it happened but he successfully commandeered my bike, sat me on the rear carrier and began cycling toward Hardwar.

Despite the heat, we got a bit of breeze going which cooled my cheeks slightly. I vaguely remember the Stranger talking to me but can’t recollect about what. Before I knew it we were back at the Station. He dropped me at the cyclewala and even paid the outstanding balance. Then with a nod of his head he disappeared as unexpectedly as he’d appeared.

I retreated to the relative comfort of the 1^st class Waiting Room. I dozed on a rattan lounge chair with extendable arms that doubled as leg rests, one of the distinctive artifacts of railway waiting halls in those days. But I was hungry. And more than a little anxious about how I was going to make the next leg of the journey.

A middle class family were the only others in the Waiting Room. The patriarch reclined on a rattan chair like mine, staring blankly at a ceiling fan that swayed as it whirred. From time to time he lifted his buttocks and farted. But other than that, he didn’t move.

He may have been oblivious to me but I had been watching him for some time. After one of his farts I cleared my throat and in my best Hindi launched into conversation. I learned they had come to Hardwar on yatra (pilgrimage) and were now heading back home. I asked him about his business (the nature of which I’ve forgotten) and may have said a nice thing or two about his young child.

As a conversationalist he was unenthusiastic.

“My mother is ill,” I offered, hoping to pique his interest.

He may have nodded, but if he did, it was ever so slightly.

“I need to get home. To Allahabad. But I have no money.”

“Why do you not have money?”

“I was robbed,” I found my mouth saying. I couldn’t believe it. But I was in the water now, so I had to keep paddling.

“This morning on the way from Dehra Dun, it was very crowded in the bogie and when I got here I realized someone had stolen my money.”

He looked at me skeptically.

“Could you provide me with Rs. 20, so I could get a ticket? My mother is very ill.”

“You must report to the Railway Police, if you have been a victim of theft.”

As far as he was concerned the conversation was over. The spinning fan captured his attention once more. I felt foolish but let a decent interval pass before shuffling out of the Waiting Room.

Once again, 24 hours after the first occasion, I entered the office of an Indian Railways bureaucrat. I had mulled over what the farting businessman had said. He was absolutely correct in his observation that the Police needed to be notified in the event of a crime. But in this case there had been no crime committed so fronting up to the Police would not be the smartest tactic. On the other hand, I was clean out of options.

The Railway Police office was shabbier than the Station Master’s in Dehra Dun. The man behind the desk had a pot belly and sweat stains all over his khaki uniform. His closely shaved head sported a choti, the little tuft of hair that identified him as a high caste Hindu. Unlike the Station Master his face lit up when I stood in front of his desk.

“Kya baat hai, baba?” he asked. What is it, lad?

Though he addressed me in Hindi he clearly didn’t expect me to respond in kind.

“Meri ma bimaar hai, aur mere paas ticket ka kiraya nahi hai,” I said, laying down the by now firm foundation of my story.

“Arey! Hindi bolte!” His belly jiggled with delight. “Ay shabaash!”

Before I could continue with my dishonest story he shot a series of questions at me in an attempt to come to grips with the fact that a white kid could speak Hindi.

I told him about me. I was American. I studied in Mussoorie. I was born in India. Rajesh Khanna was a good actor, yes.

Whereas the Station Master in Dehra Dun had instantly linked Woodstock School and my being in his office to funny business, this jolly man didn’t give a stuff. Indeed, he was hooting to a couple of underlings about what a spectacular thing I was.

Somehow in the midst of this excitement I managed to explain my dilemma: 700 kms. No money. Sickly mother.

Before I knew it he grabbed my wrist and dragged me out of his office. A couple of minutes later we were seated at an open air dhaba that sold tea and fast food to the throngs around the station.

He instructed the dhabawala to give me a plate of curry and a few chapatis. “This fellow is American but born in India! It’s true. And he speaks spasht Hindi! Just listen.” He could hardly contain himself.

Though my mouth was full (this was my first food in nearly 36 hours) I knew this was price I had to pay for my dinner. A small crowd had appeared; rather the endless crowd of passersby stopped for a moment to look at me. It was my cue.

I restated in Hindi what I had told the Policeman a few minutes earlier, that I was American, born in India, lived in Allahabad but studied in Mussoorie.

People marveled and exclaimed. The Policeman couldn’t have beamed wider had I been his son. He ordered my plate to be filled. I ate up. He continued to hold court but eventually passersby grew bored and the rhythm of the bazaar returned to normal.

The Police Inspector led me back to his office. I was grateful for the meal but had no idea how I was going to make it home.

He pressed a buzzer on his desk which immediately produced an underling. The underling was sent forth to find others and after several minutes returned with two colleagues who carried rifles and bulleted shoulder straps. They noisily pushed a pair of prisoners into the office in front of them. With their legs and wrists in irons the prisoners shuffled and clanged like cheap robots.

The inspector didn’t move from his desk and in a loud voice told the newly arrived cops that they were to include me in their party. They were on official duty, transporting criminals from Hardwar to the state capital, Lucknow. “You take this boy with you to Lucknow but do not let anyone, and I mean anyone, speak with him.”

With that, the chubby Police Inspector himself walked me to a train and bade me bon voyage. I was on my way at last. Still with no ticket but a pair of personal armed guards.