Jackals' Wedding: A Memoir of a Childhood in British India

© 2002 by Dawn Fraser Kawahara. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

ISBN: 1-4033-4302-0 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4033-4302-4 (e-book)

ISBN: 1-4033-4303-9 (Paperback)

1stBooks—rev. 12/18/02

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FOREWORD

1 NIGHT TRAIN

2 THE GENERAL

3 THE DREADED LION

4 SISTERS

5 A JEWEL AT TEA TIME

6 DEADLY NIGHTSHADE

7 JACKALS’ WEDDING

8 READYING FOR THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

9 PADMINI

10 DAWN’S STAR

11 DEHRA DUN CHRISTMAS

12 VIEW FROM THE ROOFTOP

13 RED FOR A SOLDIER’S DAUGHTER

14 KINDERGARTEN

15 WINDOW IN THE WAR

16 TO A ‘T’

17 A DEBATABLE GIFT

ALBUM

18 THE CINEMA

19 SECRETS

20 THE RIVER

21 BROWN BIRD

22 A STROLL THROUGH THE PULTAN BAZAAR

23 MINDING OUR Ps & Qs

24 SHARED NIGHTMARES

25 THE MAN IN THE ORANGE TURBAN

26 BLOODY DAMN!

27 DIGGING UP THE DARK SIDE

28 SNAKES & SCISSORS

29 JOURNEYS

30 TRAVELING BACKWARD

31 SHIVERS & MORE SHIVERS

32 THE LETTER

33 BURMA BOUND

34 ELEGY, A QUILT FOR PANSY K.

GLOSSARY

AFTERWORD

MISSING PERSON: INFORMATION WANTED

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began as a series of word snapshots in the late 1970s. I am grateful for the interest and encouragement of members of my writing group, The Sands of Tarn, especially Frances Frazier, Joy Jobson, Risa Kaparo and Wil Welsh. Their patient suggestions as the original glimpses grew into stories that were pieced together, pulled apart, then rearranged in a final pattern have been invaluable.

My thanks go to my sister Wendy Campbell, family archivist and reader, and my cousins Laura Harris Ware and Lynn Regudon, who continue to supply missing pieces of family history. I am also grateful to Nancy Margulies for her guidance.

To General and Mrs. Manohar Sodhi and Sister Regis Young of Dehra Dun, U.P., India, my deepest gratitude. And again, thank you to Mr. Sanjay Puri of Delhi and Overseas Adventure Travel guide Davinder Singh. To my best friend Delano Kawahara, my husband, a warm mahalo for inspiration and support in making my return to India and this book possible.

Permissions & Credits

Special thanks to poet Robert Bly for bringing me back to the Indian mystic poets through his performance magic, as well as permission to include his translation of Why Mira Can’t Go Back to Her Old House, News of the Universe, Sierra Club Books, Copyright 1980. My long-remembered lullabye, From the poppy bole, by Sarojini Naidu, is a version published in Shiva’s Pigeons by Jon & Rumer Godden, Chatto & Windus Publ., 1972, London, Eng., U.K. Cal hamsa wa des jahan is excerpted from Songs of Kabir, by and translated by Rabindranath

Tagore, Samuel Weiser, Inc., New York, 1977 (first published 1915).

The commonly quoted, There, but for the grace of God, go I, is attributed in its first (oft-quoted) form to one John Bradford in 1553 (MacMillan’s Dictionary of Maxims, Proverbs & Phrases). Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman movie role quotes come from Casablanca, the 1940s triple-Oscar award-winning film, Warner Bros.-First National MGM/United Artists.

I also wish to thank the editors of the following publications and anthologies and curators of poetry festivals and visual displays in which parts of this memoir first appeared, sometimes in different versions:

•  Bamboo Ridge Press: Deadly Nightshade

•  Garden Island Arts Council 4th Annual Poetry Fest Exhibition: Spell

•  Mid South Poetry Festival: Fantaisie Impromptu

•  Poets Study Club of Terre Haute: Reprints

•  Riverstone, and Artist’s Embassy International Dancing Poetry Festival: Personal Suttee

•  Sandcutters: Midsummer White Sale

Thanks, also, to the National League of American Pen Women—Albuquerque, NM Branch, for awarding Red for a Soldier’s Daughter in their National Short Story competition, 1996-1997.

For my children

Brian Allen

Angela Dawn

Christopher Keith

Jason Vincent

who, each in their own way,

BIRTHED their mother

& for Wendy Rose

my SISTER FRIEND in the journey

& for Doris, Joy, & Delano

who gave me LOVE &TRUST

& my parents

Pansy Katherine

William James

whose ghosts, no longer the jackals of my memory, I release into LIGHT & PEACE...

FOREWORD

In India, as a child, I learned that jackals’ wedding meant a rainstorm lit by sunshine—a marriage of opposites. Jackals’ Wedding, my story within a family story set in that land of my birth, tells of a past of puzzling opposites. These memories and reflections mirror the mysterious India of birth and death cycles, famine and plenty, drought and monsoon—opposites containing all shades in between, the twin aspects of the goddess Kali, the creator and devourer, bound together as one.

Tigers, and oil, and tea are all I remember, I once blithely answered when an Indian professor who’d taken me for a whirl, folkdancing in Boulder, asked me. When he stopped dead, held me at arm’s length and searched my face with a furrowed look sharper than the crease in his white, white slacks, I had to think twice about the superficial untruth I’d blurted.

Memory is who we are, after all—all that I am, to be precise. Every moment of the past has led to the present moment, which, even before it’s singled out and named, has rocketed to future. Without memories, whether colored by a nostalgic, golden haze or an emotional swirl of muddy water, I would become unhinged, set adrift, an island alone.

There were many parts of my early life I’d locked away in the dark, just like my mother and my grandmother, before her. The good things that surfaced were idealized, airbrushed into scenes worthy of Kipling, or The Little Princess. I knew the romantic version, but what was the truth?

What had really happened during those years in India? How had my mother and father became ensnared in a storm and sun relationship, a jackals’ wedding, with my sister and me dragged along unwittingly? How had the exigencies of wartime prevented them from dealing with their own blow-ups? What was the big taboo within our family? Why so many secrets locked away, as my mother’s heart had seemed locked to me? I was hungry, also, to know the truth of the grandparents who died without my having known them and the grandparents who, when the opportunity came, were not up to the disturbing interruption of a little granddaughter in their home.

I began to dig down to the beginning through my first memories that are entwined with the unrest of the times and with my mother’s stories of Maymyo, Burma, where she first knew she loved the little boy who later became my father. I didn’t allow my mind to skitter away from my mother’s need to cover her origins and talk and behave like the Brits, all the while despising them. I delved back to when my maternal grandmother hid her dark-skinned sister; back to when my father was whipped and sent into the night, a small boy terrified of tigers roaming the surrounding jungle. I telescoped back to when India was grappling for her independence; to when private British schools in India trained little Indian princes to succeed at posh boarding schools in England; back to when the Japanese bombed India’s port cities and raged through Burma. Before Pearl Harbor; before those heroes we called The Americans threw in their lot to turn the tide of the war in Asia and the Pacific Theater as we experienced its effects.

Years after my mother’s death, I exhumed the musty contents of old boxes stuffed with letters, books, papers, that she’d dragged from one country to the next, searching. I grappled with the continuing see-saw relationship forged with my sister.

With a stroke of serendipity, my husband convinced me I must return to India, the land of my birth, and my childhood home in Dehra Dun. It was not a dream; we could make it real.

During this trip together, time spans were erased. People stepped forward to help. Images and voices and feelings came flooding back, and I was ready to examine them as I’d examined the belongings that had traveled half the world in battered leather cases.

Brought to light, the joys of my childhood flashed vivid and fragile as glass bangles. Fears that had lurked large as nightmare lions and scary as snakes dissolved like thunderheads shrinking and fading into a quiet sky.

In Jackals’ Wedding the stories of the child I was and the woman I’ve become are braided with my mother’s story and the stories she told. Many times during the writing, it seemed she was back, whispering in my ear what she wasn’t able to tell, in life. Pansy Katherine Gooch Harris Fraser was, after all, the family storyteller. Maybe this was because my father, William James Fraser, was seldom home.

The recent story takes place in the fall of 2000 during our travels in The Heart of India, and Nepal. The early story takes place between the war years of 1940 and 1945, a journey from birth in Assam, in northeast India, to the hill station of Dehra Dun, in the northwestern Himalayas. It can’t help but hinge on my father’s tour of duty on a Royal Indian Navy minesweeper in the Arabian Sea, and its annihilation; it can’t avoid being colored by the nightmare of Burma’s Arakan Jungle fighting he survived. It encompasses his posts between Bombay and Delhi, a brief civilian health furlough in wartime

Calcutta, and my mother’s struggle to remain a professional woman yet keep her man, and take all responsibility for my sister and myself. It tracks the swoop by train we made through the heart of the Indian subcontinent before we embarked to Burma, the birthplace of both my parents and, up until before we took flight in 1946, an annexed part of British India.

The background weave touches on the past of my grandparents, those born in India and those who came and settled there. India became home to family members of both the Fraser/Stewart and Harris/Courpalais sides, who rarely glanced back to their origins in the British Isles or France: on my father’s side, his grandfather, a ship’s doctor who fell for the Orient, never again to live in Scotland; on my mother’s side, forebears some seven generations back whose fascination with the magical spice islands began on Reunion island around 1650, and whose love for India took root when lands in southern India were opened up for sale as a French colony, long before the Victorian period of The Raj.

The memories I dwell on are different from the memories my sister Wendy writes. Perhaps each person’s earliest memory reflects an attitude or way of perceiving that sets the course of a life. Whether the memory shapes and defines you, or you remember a particular moment because it meshes with your way of being and seeing, is not important.

As I grappled with the writing and re-writing of Jackals’ Wedding, I held on to the belief that at the bottom of the box—even Pandora’s Box—lies hope. I resolved that my parents weren’t a prince/beast and a wicked queen/mother provider, just two ordinary people with dreams and hopes, and limitations, like myself. Their lives happened to coincide with wartime and the remnants of a larger tapestry of colonial history.

Neither of my parents has a marked grave. This return voyage has provided a grave site of sorts for my mother, where I can put her to rest lovingly, and with compassion. I am still searching for my father.

Dawn Fraser Kawahara Wailua, Kaua`i, Hawaii

Jackals’ Wedding

All the major characters of Jackals’ Wedding are or were actual people. The names of several minor characters have been changed. In some instances one character has become a blend of several.

Time is a blind guide...

No one is born just once,

If you’re lucky, you’ll emerge, again in someone’s arms...’

-Anne Michaels,

Fugitive Pieces

Chapter 1

NIGHT TRAIN

The taxi arrives late to the gateway of Sanjay Puri’s guesthouse. The driver’s companion hurls in our packs, and we scramble in.

Old Delhi Station, says Dee, nervously checking his watch.

Right. The driver lurches off.

Nothing in our experience traveling throughout India and Nepal for the past three weeks, even with constant horn honking and sacred cows and herds of goats and buffaloes, with no designated lanes, has prepared us for the bustle and din of Delhi’s Connaught Place. The grand circles planned and engineered by the British in a bygone era are a street-jammed scramble, heightened tonight by the throngs out celebrating the Deshara Festival, one of the biggest of the year. As we ride along, the air is thick with pollution. Beyond the exhaust fumes from the press of Maruti three-wheel autos and the dust kicked up by these and the buses and motorbikes, the air is poisoned with punk from the holiday fireworks. Wheels of color and light explode all about us, lighting up the sky and adding to the general din and clamor.

Coughing, I grab the bandanna out of my purse. As I tie it over my nose, bandit-style, I catch our driver’s eyes in the rear-view mirror, watching. He remarks something out of the side of his mouth to his companion, then asks if we mind if they smoke. I wave perfunctorily. What a joke, I say under my breath to Dee, motioning to the tips of their glowing cigarettes as they drag on them, already lit.

You’ve got the tickets? he asks huskily, then explodes into a coughing fit, himself.

Yes, I say, patting my purse.

It seems we are plowing through a confluence of rivers, people streaming around us in all directions. How no one gets run over confounds me; how these vehicles avoid crashes and fender benders in this jam confounds me, too.

The confusion increases near the station. We are very late now. Dee hurriedly tips the driver and we rush in, elbowing our way through the crush. All the notice boards bearing schedules and track numbers are in Hindi. One look around confirms that the Old Delhi Station is immense, a town within a city, with multiple tracks and changing levels, and, again, masses of people pressing towards their trains or taxis, or just plain hoofing it.

There must be an information booth. Someone must speak English, I say, looking about desperately. Over there, see?

We hurry over. Which platform, the Mussoorie Express, please?

The clerk consults his schedule, tells us a platform number and points the way. We hurriedly wind in and out of the crowd, but once there, people boarding tell us this is not the train we’re looking for. They don’t answer further questions.

Maybe they can’t understand, I say, shifting my pack to the other shoulder.

Maybe they don’t care, says Dee.

Mussoorie Express, North? Dehra Dun? I keep asking as we plow back the way we’ve come, then step right up to a hawk-faced man in khakis and a beret armed with a lathi, the policeman’s stick, expecting help. He looks right through me as I ask, strides on as if I were invisible.

A young woman in a blue sari with an old man hobbling on her arm says, Excuse me, madam. Platform nine for Mussoorie. She motions us to follow as they negotiate a jammed stairway. Separated by the milling crowd, we manage to follow the pair up, then over and down to a train wheezing at trackside. The woman glances around. No, no, she says, letting go of the old man to wave her arms like signal flags, then points to the stairs, behind us, and right. We hurry back up and along the high walkway.

At last, a number display, Dee says, sprinting ahead of me. There, alongside the platform, we see the hoped-for Mussoorie Express.

The letters are painted clearly, however, none of its cars are numbered. We rush car to car, enduring the stench of sewage beneath the rails as we read the passenger lists posted by each doorway. Now Dee spots a familiar name—the name of our Delhi host who acted as our agent. They must have listed him, instead, he says.

Yes, that must be it, I say with a grateful out breath.

We board and scurry down the car’s narrow passageway until we find our compartment. There we face the snapping eyes of a fashionably dressed Indian woman swinging red high-heels from the upper berth.

Excuse me. There must be some mistake. Mr. Sanjay Puri has booked this compartment for us, says Dee.

She draws herself up. "This is my compartment. I am Mrs. Sanjay Puri of Delhi," she says, her mouth an accusatory slash.

Sanjay Puri? I mouth soundlessly. Then, aloud, Of Yatri House?

Not that Puri. Have you a reservation in first class? This is first class, you know.

We back out, apologizing for the intrusion, but there’s no time to pursue the coincidence. The time for boarding is fast running out.

Next car, I board first. I show my tickets to a man who’s already seated.

The second-class sleeper cars are near the back of the train, he says, inclining his head toward the conductor, who is just entering, making his way down the cars.

Finally, someone to help, I think. Can you tell us which car, sir? I ask the conductor, handing him the tickets.

The corners of his mouth turn down. These are no good, he says, shoving them back at me. Get off.

I stare into his blustering face. Not after traveling back to the other side of the world. No sir! I focus on the watch chain stretched across his well-fed paunch. Not when I’m this close, with only so much time. He moves on, paying us no more attention than he would a fly in his jam.

Please, I entreat him, but he’s passed through into the next car.

Something must be wrong. Let’s get off, says Dee, reaching for my arm.

I pull away. No. These were confirmed. I appeal again to the English-speaking man, but seeing his expression, know no further help will be forthcoming. Wives should obey their husbands, say his eyes, while from his mouth, I hear, Madam, why are you insisting on getting on a train on which you are not booked?

My blood boils as I step down from that car to the now empty platform. Departure time is upon us.

Hell with it, let’s go back, says Dee, taking hold of my arm.

No! I jerk free and rush to read the next car’s passenger list, and the next—there are only two left. The whistle blasts its deafening warning and the wheels begin to shift. Come on! I yell in desperation.

What are you doing?

I’m going to Dehra Dun, that’s what I’m doing.

The train is moving as we board. Another loud blast of the whistle, and the Mussoorie Express is on its way. We stand wedged near the bathrooms by the car couplers, hanging on as the train picks up speed and the rocking motion begins in earnest.

This is crazy. They’re going to put us off, says Dee.

I’m not letting this train roll without me.

The conductor is mighty pissed.

Let him be pissed; I don’t care, and I’m not going back to Delhi—not until after Dehra Dun, anyway.

But he...

Listen, Dee. The arrangements are in place—Mr. Puri assured us. And we paid for these tickets.

I’m telling you that guy’s going to be madder than hell when he comes back and finds us here.

"I don’t give a damn. We’ve only got three days before we’re due to fly back home. We have to straighten this out."

What can we do?

What our friend, Frances, said from her experience, ‘If you’re challenged in India, challenge ‘em right back.’

You’re forgetting that was years ago.’

Some things don’t change, I counter.

But this isn’t just a matter of bringing in a gift of whiskey.

There was more to it than that. Anyway, I’m not backing down. That conductor’s just a petty official.

With the power to throw us off this train.

I rummage in my purse. ’Drag out papers. Any at all, signed or stamped—that’ll get their attention,’ Frances said. ‘Let them know you have pull.’ "

Dee rubs the bristle of his five-o’clock shadow, looking unconvinced. We stand, feet braced to avoid falling on our noses, not talking.

It isn’t long before the conductor discovers us again. What are you doing here? I told you to get off, he bypasses Dee to bully me.

I draw myself up straight, move in a step and look him in the eye. He backs off. We are paid, and confirmed, I say, again producing our tickets. See here? I point. Kawahara is the name. K—A—W...

Wait-listed, only. There is no room—not one seat left.

Not after fifty-five years, and this close. I wipe the spray of his spittle off my face. See, here, we have two bunks reserved, I hear myself say. I fan out our tickets like a winning hand. To and from Dehra Dun. I slap them three times with the back of my fingers. Mr. Sanjay Puri of Delhi arranged them for us with the station agent. Mussoorie Express, going; Shatabdi, coming back. I point to the agent’s signature. If there is any problem, we shall notify Mr. Davinder Singh, our trip guide.

Hmmph! he snorts, and snatches the tickets from me, squinting to read the fine print. I take in his nameplate pinned above his coat pocket.

Mr. Gupta, I wish to speak to your supervisor.

There are no seats left, he says again, pushing by me to disappear into the last car.

I tell you, they’re going to put us off, says Dee, glancing through the window of the fire door into the blackness. We’ll be in cut-throat territory.

"Who are ‘they’? You mean this pompous little guy, this Mr. Gupta? I’m not letting him put us off. We’ll stand all the way, if it comes to that," I say, keeping up the brave show while my knees turn to jelly.

The car attendant, who’s been standing by watching the drama unfold, gestures to a narrow seat he’s folded down. I gratefully sink onto what I suppose must be his perch. One man after another squeezes by to the bathroom. Dee leans in the corner, refusing to look at me. He stares out as the lights stretch farther and farther apart. We hear only an occasional explosive boom now, the fireworks winding down. His face is weary; his shoulders droop.

Well take turns sitting here, I say, even as I wonder if either of us is up to the all-night shifts standing or perched on this minuscule seat. As it is, we’re pushing past 11 o’clock on the night of a day that began thousands of miles away in Nepal.

I close my eyes and, after awhile, recapture the view of Mount Everest and its sister peaks floating in silken clouds before daybreak; the postcard villages and fields seen during the bus trip winding down to Kathmandu; the crowds at Trivandrum Airport, and the hours of queuing and being frisked and frisked twice more. To prevent another highjacking during the re-entry flight to Delhi, they said. And none of us complained.

I can’t escape the reek of these urinals, but I can pretend I’m breathing in the clean, cold air of the hills. And I can conjure the faces of our traveling companions, safely winging their way back home to the good old USA. And here we are, trying to get to Dehra Dun. What a stupid idea, I think. What a stupid quest How could I ever have thought I could return? You can’t recapture what has been; everyone says, You can’t go home again.

I succeed in convincing myself that home, unlike my memories, will have changed or may have disappeared by the time the conductor returns. He clears his throat and flicks invisible crumbs off his navy blue uniform.

I have found your names on the passenger list, he says, but one berth only.

No argument. We grab our packs and follow him like prisoners receiving an unexpected reprieve. As he ushers us into our compartment, a youth in the upper bunk

gives us a shy smile, and the man we assume is his father nods hello.

Dee and I give in to our exhaustion. We work out a system where we can fit in the one narrow bunk if we lie like spoons in a drawer, me on the inside. While this is going on, we ignore their spying on us through lowered lashes.

Dehra Dun, Dehra Dun, the night train clacks along the rails in a reassuring monotony. I haven’t quite stopped trembling from the flow of adrenaline that started in the station and increased with each confrontation, and willingly give over to the train’s rock-and-sway. We are on our way. I breathe in the comforting scent of my husband’s skin, a smell like green tea and citrons, and my shakes begin to lessen. Dee reaches back with a love pat and I raise up enough to lean over and kiss him.

At that moment our neighbor turns toward us, sighing loudly as he draws the blanket up under his chin, and proceeds to introduce himself as a railroad man from Bombay. He and his family have been traveling with another family since early morning, not of this day, but the day before. They are eight people, he says, with five bunks.

I nudge Dee, whisper, That explains it.

What? he whispers back.

Why our berths were appropriated.

Maybe...

Our neighbor keeps talking. We’re bound for Haridwar on holiday. My wife’s brother lives there. I can travel free, and my family gets passes. Where are you going?

I jostle Dee now. No ‘maybe’ about it, I whisper as Dee tells him, then jostles me back.

Ah—Dehra Dun, the hill station, says the railroad man. That is nice.

No response.

It’s the next stop after ours, he says. When there’s still no response, he adds, Wealthy people live there. Retired soldiers.

Then he’s blessedly quiet. I huddle around the L of my husband’s back, trying to get comfy. My folded sweater only slightly softens the rock-like pillow of my pack. But I am glad to be on this train, glad to be on the way to Dehra Dun.

My mental picture of the Welham School and its surrounding property and our Dehra Dun house is so grand that I wonder, Were we rich back then? Or subsidized to live graciously, attended by servants, by the rich Indian families of the little boys Mother taught? It comes to me that these high-class families lived in a far more luxurious manner, surrounded by the benefits of their wealth and pampered and waited upon by droves of servants.

I think about how, up until tonight, our American dollars have bought us the treatment of visiting dignitaries all along the way, top notch service, wonderful food, rooms in the sumptuous Taj Hotels and rajah’s hunting lodges. Even the camel camp tents were furbished and boasted attached bathrooms and running water. I think back to the first day in Delhi, some three weeks before, touring in an air-conditioned private coach to see the diplomatic mansions, the India gate and various temples, ending with the mad dash of the bicycle-rickshaw ride through the teeming Chandni Chowk bazaar. All pre-arranged and orchestrated through our travel company.

Tonight, I say, the real adventure begins.

What? asks Dee, sleepily.

The real adventure begins, I say, louder, and readjust my pack pillow. Dee groans. The whistle blows in a minor key. The train shifts between rhythms. I lie very still, but my mind keeps racing. Could it be true, like Bob, the engineer of our group said, that in India the tracks are not welded together? Will our train slip off and crash? Could this sheet on our berth be full of germs? The blanket, too? They weren’t wrapped in plastic, after all. Maybe they host some bed bugs. Berth bugs, I correct myself aloud, trying to find some humor in this situation.

Dee yawns like a lion. Try to get some sleep, he says.

I realize my nerves and emotions have gone slack. It is helping to be in the warm dark, rocked by the train and comforted, somehow. My mind is diverted as our sleeping neighbor snores himself half-awake. I hear him grunting as he shifts in his berth, settling to start the cycle all over again.

I’m snuggling closer to Dee, running my hand along his side, when a voice interrupts.

Mr. Kawahara?

Huh? What? Dee attempts to rise, digging me with his elbow. Sorry, hon. Stuck through the curtains, a light shining around it, we make out Mr. Gupta’s round face, smiling.

It happens that bunk 12, it is empty. Do you want to move?

Dee swings into sitting position on the edge of the berth. He turns to look to me, blinking. We both look at our sonorous friend across the way, already building up to another crescendo. I’ll stay, he says.

You can have bunk 12, Mr. Gupta says, holding open the curtains.

With difficulty I edge into position beside Dee. A man standing behind Mr. Gupta gawks in at us. Others waiting in line for the bathroom make no bones about staring in at us.

No thanks, Dee tells Mr. Gupta, shaking his head.

He, too, may be recalling the warning of foul play that can occur while train travelers sleep—the only reason I’ve been sleeping on my lumpy pack.

We are on our honeymoon, I blurt out to get Mr. Gupta to shut the curtains and go away, surprising myself as much as him.

Honeymoon? he chortles. The women cover their mouths and titter. I settle down, guessing at their reaction—These old foreigners, honeymooning, it appears.

Dee gingerly folds himself back down beside me on the bunk’s edge. "Honeymoon?" he whispers over his shoulder.

They can think what they will. Maybe we won’t get robbed and strangled in the night. I am bone tired and weary beyond caring. My last waking thought is, Wow—listen to me. I have really become an American.

Throughout the night the train stops and shifts, starts off and stops again. At intervals I worry Dee’s shoulder, or he worries mine so we can turn over, an impossible feat if not done in concert. Our Bombay man’s continued snoring and the sounds of the train act as a rough lullaby. At one point when the train has stopped, I wake. Have we slipped off the rails? There is a lot of clanking and jarring as we begin to move again, but backward. How can that be?

Whispers too soon, disturbing me; gray light. Our neighbor wakes his son, all yawns and tousled hair. His wife comes in. The daughter climbs up beside her brother and starts combing his hair. I watch the trainman’s missus arrange a fold of her sari like a veil over her satin hair. How can she look so rested and perfectly turned out, like a model? I wonder, feeling fuzzy, ugly and rumpled.

Pulling the covers, sanitized or not, over my head, I attempt to go back to sleep when Mr. Gupta slides the curtains apart so the rings make a loud clacking noise, as if they’re in danger of shattering. Laksar just past, Haridwar soon, he booms.

We’re getting close. I jiggle Dee and struggle onto an elbow to see what I can see.

Mr. Gupta consults his pocket watch and his timetable. Tea, he bellows. Next station.

Dee swings himself into sitting position. I take my place in line for the bathroom just as the train comes to a screeching halt. Nearby, the tea-wallah fills clay cups from a steaming urn.

After Haridwar we have the compartment to ourselves and two steaming cups to sip. So—I wasn’t dreaming in the night. We’re faced backwards this morning, I remark.

I noticed. The train isn’t going backwards, though. We’re just riding that way.

Let’s move, I say, setting down my cup and getting up to clear the blanket from our neighbor’s vacant berth. Dee helps me fold back the day seat and hook it into position. I’m curious, though. Why the turn-around?

Beats me.

I hand him his tea and settle down with mine, breathing in the strong, leafy smell and the steam.

The only thing I can come up with is that somewhere, they must have switched to the engine down our end, says Dee.

Sipping my tea, I think about the why and the how of this as I stare past what I have come to think of as our Honeymoon Bunk, then out of the window again.

After some miles, we slow and stop again. On the small platform families perch on suitcases, bunched tightly, faces upturned like flowers awaiting sun. ROORKEE says the sign under its Hindi lettering.

A woman lifts the hem of her sari and steps deftly over the muddy trench running toward the tracks. I watch an old couple brushing their teeth at the communal water spigot, thinking of my parents. The old couple spits and stares, their neem twigs in hand. Nothing is hidden in India, I think, my nostrils curling again at the remembered stench rising from the Old Delhi Station track bed. But that’s not true. Something was hidden from me here in India when I was a child, and I’ve come to find out what

The last buildings of Roorkee disappear. I settle comfortably into Dee’s encircling arm, feeling his warmth as I stare toward the fields, trees, and distant hills. Maybe he and I will be able to grow old together.

This is the same view Dad would have had, coming unannounced that Christmas morning, I say. Mother almost dropped the kettle, hearing his call. I can still hear his voice—’Pat-sy, Patsy Kate?’ He always called her that. She hated her name, Pansy.

Like you hated ‘Pamela?’

Maybe. But for different reasons.

You do seem more like a Dawn than a Pamela. He busses my cheek and cuddles me closer. Why ‘unannounced’?

What?

Why did your father come unannounced?

He wrote that he couldn’t get any leave, then, last minute, was able to secure one.

You sure he didn’t just want to spring a big surprise?

Maybe. Mother told me he liked taking people off guard, and that he liked the lime-light.

Conflicting images of the dad I manufactured from the stories over the years carom around in my mind. I stare harder at the scenery. Would these tall stands of trees have been saplings when he passed this way that Christmas, staring out like this, himself? Or were they then little shoots, or even seeds?

The old narrow gauge line, says Dee, pointing to some tracks pushed higgledy-piggledy on the side some fifteen yards from the train. These run beside us like a child’s discarded Erector set. He offers me the big bottle of Bisleri water provided by the train.

Wiping the drips off my chin with the back of my hand, I say, Dad must have had such a sense of anticipation, coming to be with Mum again that Christmas.

How long had he been away?

Probably months and months. This was after the Brooke Bonds Tea job in Calcutta, when he’d re-enlisted. Yes, that Christmas she certainly buzzed with excitement when he arrived. You could feel the sexual tension in the air, thick enough to cut with a knife.

Dee’s eyebrows go up as he drinks. "How could you know that?"

"Well, I didn’t know it was sexual tension then, I say, savoring the feeling of us together, held momentarily in this rocking womb of the train. Then I sit up straight. But we—Wendy and I—could feel the current between them. After all, he’d been away in the Arakan Jungle, where she didn’t know from day to day whether he was alive or dead. A real hell hole. I’ve read that many of the men who were pulled out for medical reasons—you know, besides wounds: dysentery, malaria, cholera, the grossest skin infections, what’s called jungle rot—put a bullet through their heads after being released from field hospitals to active duty."

Rather than go back?

I nod. Funny, though...

What’s funny?

That Christmas in Dehra Dun stands out because it’s the only memory of him coming to see us there—just that once.

Those long separations must have been hard in all ways.

I settle my legs to the side, give Dee a playful dig in the ribs. Wendy told me later about the words and the sounds she heard from their bedroom, and I remember walking in on them and wondering what game they were playing under the covers.

No privacy, huh? Dee laughs, takes my hand in his warm one, interlaces his fingers with mine.

I must have been a brat. I nestle close and give over to the feeling of him combing the hair off my forehead with his fingers, the way he does when we’re spent, satisfied, and going to sleep side by side. Think of her worry, I say, putting myself in my mother’s place. Can you imagine how it must be not knowing, moment to moment, if your husband is alive or dead? And going about your work, your daily routine? I know how I would feel if it were you. I never realized...

How could you? You were just a child.

Thank you for that. I lay my head on his shoulder. I’ll never really know how those separations and brief reunions must have been for my mother, what kind of pressure she bore. I’m sad it’s taken me so long to see her through the eyes of a woman, instead of the child.

Along our route I strain to recognize something, anything, but there’s no sudden start of recognition until we see the great deodar trees. Their needles glisten, catching the sunlight, but where their branches overlap lies a pool of dense, dark shadows. I remember this forest, from when we left Dehra Dun—probably on those old tracks you pointed out.

This’ll be fun, seeing what all you remember, says Dee.

Probably not much, I say, hoping I’m wrong.

"You haven’t forgotten what Davinder said about our Dehra Dun plans out on the Ganges, have you? This is a

‘most auspicious time’ for your return, what with the festival and all."

Don’t you just love that word, auspicious? I say lightly, even as I think how our guide, before he left our group in Varanasi, pronounced that my return would coincide with the ninth day of the ninth month in the ninth cycle, according to the Hindu calendar—or, at least, close to it. I hope he wasn’t just putting me on. This trip certainly didn’t start out that way.

No-o. But let’s forget the Old Delhi Station, for now, and our first clashes with Mr. Gupta.

What a turn-around, huh? I guess if one of our railroad men hadn’t enough bunks to sleep his family on a cross-country trip, we might withhold a few from foreigners, too.

We ride along in silence for awhile, each in our own thoughts.

Davinder wasn’t kidding about the festival, was he? Dee asks suddenly.

I shake my head, no. We had run smack into that.

All through India and Nepal this week we’d seen people flocking to the nightly enactments of the Ramayana epic, an ancient play celebrating the Prince of Light’s triumphs over the forces of darkness. Davinder had tossed off remarks about how the bad guy not only gets hissed and booed, or stomped, depending—same as in our melodramas—but burned in effigy. In Nepal I’d watched for the roundup of the black water buffaloes he’d told us about, their slaughter to be the symbolic finale to the festival and plays. It wasn’t until we were going back to the airport that we’d seen a few here, a few there, being driven along from the mountain pastures to converge into a dark torrent of bellowing beasts rushing to their end.

Was it just yesterday morning that we were riding that bus down the edge of those crazy hairpin curves back to Kathmandu, watching the buffalo round-up? Dee says, paralleling my thoughts.

Today their throats will be slit—ugh. I suppress a shudder.

No different from any big slaughter house.

There’ll be such a ‘meat frenzy,’ to use Davinder’s terms.

"Savage. But only in Nepal, right? Not here, in India."

Right. The ceremonial gorging’s probably going on right now. I brush my eyes, trying not to focus on the imagined scene.

On a purely hygienic level, with the lack of refrigeration, that makes sense. The meat would go to waste if not eaten right away. I guess we can’t judge the customs of others—huh?—like you and I’ve talked about.

I silently applaud Dee’s open-mindedness while I search out the idea, buried somewhere in my mind, that red-blooded men really need red meat while women—well... This must be another of her theories Mother planted in me.

Why the chuckle? Dee asks.

No reason, I say. I’ve got to think more on that light-dark, good-evil dichotomy of this festival, though—such a play of opposites. I haven’t a clear sense of the meaning, yet, but there’s something about the way it’s brought to an end percolating.

Percolate, percolate. I’m learning about you.

How’s that?

The way you think everything’s a symbol. You know. Anyway, I’m learning about you being a stubborn little thing, he says, drawing me close again.

Willful, I say as he hugs me, and as I’m now admitting, a bit of a brat.

More buildings, large and small, whiz by. We pass a few grazing cows, safe, serene, and passively chewing their cuds as they stare at our train. We slow down, and start seeing vendors ready to hawk everything from marigold garlands to statues of Kali, soda and ice cream bars.

There must be about ten-thousand people living here now, what with the refugees from Tibet—Dehra Dun is not far from Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s refuge, I tell Dee.

You want to go there, request an audience?

There isn’t time—not on this trip, anyway.

Let’s make time to look for a singing bowl for you, though. If the Tibetans are here like in Kathmandu, we ought to be able to find one.

We could look in the bazaar.

The train begins to slow. Do you have the hotel address handy? asks Dee.

I know it by heart. I say.

Dee helps me on with my pack, turns me about, and plunks my straw hat back on my head. Speaking of symbols, you know that whole thing about being turned around backward to go forward? I ask him. It’s like a living metaphor—same as what I’m feeling and trying to understand about the black buffaloes.

Explain, he says, running his fingers through his hair and hefting his pack.

I mean like my coming back here, backward in time, so I can see or know something that I need for the future. I smooth down my shirt’s Hawaiian design of taro leaves, hoping I look presentable.

I get it. Before you move forward again, he says, putting on his cap. We’ll see. Whatever happens, happens. I just hope they have a room for us.

I hope they have a shower, and a comfy bed. I wink.

Here’s the station, English lettering at the bottom of a sign neatly proclaiming we’ve arrived in DEHRADUN—

one word—and unlike the Old Delhi Station, just a small station house at trackside, a smattering of people.

Don’t you want to bid our friend, Mr. Gupta, aloha? No thanks! Come, take my picture under the sign. Dee’s right, I think as he’s focusing the camera. Never mind the initial mix-up and scramble. I will hold the thought that this trip back to my first remembered home, starting with this very day and no matter the outcome, is a gift to the forever part of me from myself

Chapter 2

THE GENERAL

Marble, shining marble everywhere, like many of the palaces and public buildings of India. The President Hotel, chosen sight unseen, doesn’t disappoint us. Like all the pairs of distinct opposites we’ve experienced in India, the austere space set apart by its mirrored walls strikes us as a complete contrast to the higgledy-piggledy center of town we’ve seen during the ride to Rajpur Road, jouncing along in the Maruti three-wheeler.

On the way I stared all around, searching. The bazaar lanes, the clock tower, the hawkers and sweet sellers squatting before carefully arranged pyramids of confections, the holiday crowd weaving itself into an ever-changing border of bright poppies (the women) and earth tones (the men). And, O, the unmistakable smell of chilies and sizzling ghee wafting from the dal and chapatti stands. And dust, always, the dust—swept out, blown and tracked in, swept out once again—for how many centuries?

The English-speaking clerk of this Indian business class hotel efficiently assigns us a room, asks if we’re hungry. He points past wrap-around divans and planters of greenery down three wide steps to the hotel restaurant, which looks inviting. But first, we follow the bellman up, up, up flights of white marble stairs. We can tell he is surprised by our lack of luggage, just daypacks. And then, again, by Dee’s generous tip, which spurs him to adjust the cobalt curtains just so against the harsh sun and turn on the air conditioner full blast. He gestures to the bottled water inside the small refrigerator. As soon as he goes, we collapse with a sigh, each of us spread-eagled on a twin bed and reveling in the freedom and space of it. Hunger drives us downstairs again, where we demolish plates heaped with scrambled eggs and toast with marmalade and drain glasses of juice and milk. We open our guidebook again to Dehra Dun and environs and plan our afternoon before dragging ourselves upstairs to collapse.

Waking from a blessed sleep, I settle myself by Dee and stroke his hair, his forehead, the prickles of his unshaved chin. He makes contented sounds in his throat, stretches like a cat. Then reaches for his watch.

Past noon already. We’d better get started, he says, kissing me on the nose.

Yesss.

We are too bent on outer discovery to make love. Instead, we splash ourselves clean in