Indian Summer: A Love Letter to India and the Story of India 29

© 2014 ARTHUR J. FRANKEL. All rights reserved.

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

Away from the book THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright ©1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 1958, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright 1986 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/11/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6180-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6179-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-6176-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014902217

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Indian Summer

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Getting Out of Dodge

Chapter 2 - In the Beginning

Chapter 3 - Setting the Stage

Chapter 4 - Nuts and Bolts

Chapter 5 - The Roads That Diverged in the Peace Corps Woods

Chapter 6 - Left Behind

Chapter 7 - The Orientation Express

Chapter 8 - Anavatti—The Journey Begins

Chapter 9 - Anavatti—Digging In

Chapter 10 - Mallapur—Kitchen Capers

Chapter 11 - Anavatti—Odds and Ends

Chapter 12 - Mallapur—It Takes a Village

Chapter 13 - Time Out for Good Behavior

Chapter 14 - Mallapur—Puja

Chapter 15 - Ankola—The Heat and the Music

Chapter 16 - Typhoid Artie

Chapter 17 - The Faces of India

Chapter 18 - Kumta—The Monsoon Cometh

Chapter 19 - Helene

Chapter 20 - Jew Town and the Maharaja

Chapter 21 - The Fit Hits the Shan

Chapter 22 - Mangalore—Coming of Indian Age

Chapter 23 - A Draft Blowin’ In

Chapter 24 - Settling In

Chapter 25 - The Worm Turns

Chapter 26 - Away

Chapter 27 - Homecoming—A Bang and a Whimper

Epilogue - Return to Anavatti

Appendix - Map of Mysore State; pictures; and Peace

About The Author

To my mother,

Marian Greengard Frankel,

who was my muse in so many ways.

And to John F. Kennedy and Sargent Shriver,

the founder of the Peace Corps and the first director of the Peace Corps.

The foundation they laid

and their vision for the Peace Corps

lives on today.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIRST, I MUST THANK MY wife, Marylou, for all of the help she gave me with this book. She not only tolerated my disappearing for up to six hours a day for two years as I wrote the manuscript, but she read and reread drafts, tirelessly editing and offering significant and creative suggestions that made my story better.

My daughters, Shannon Frankel Forchheimer and Rachel Frankel Pesek, and my sister, Barbara Frankel, all excellent writers in their own right, read an early draft and offered excellent feedback that helped me shape the final manuscript.

I must also thank Satish Chandra and his family in Bangalore, India—his wife Suesheila, his son Chetan, and his daughter Bindu—for their support and kindnesses over many years. Whenever I came to India, often with members of my family, they opened their home and their hearts, making my visits to India more like coming home than a visit to a foreign land.

Many thanks are due to all of the people I have met in India. I will always remember how they accepted and welcomed me, sharing their homes and meals, and teaching me their customs and way of life. I cannot remember all of their names, but I will never forget their smiling faces.

And of course, there is no way to adequately thank my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers and the staff of India 29. Without their support, my experiences in India and this book would not have been possible.

Many of the American and Indian names I use in this memoir are fictitious, but some are real, particularly the first names of the four other members of my team: Kathy, Carol, Neil, and Burke, and my girlfriend, Helene. I have lost track of them, but they stay in my mind just as they were in 1966–68, young vibrant men and women who became like a family to me during the two years I was a volunteer in India. If any of the India 29 volunteers or staff read this book, I hope they contact me. I can be reached at aprofessor@msn.com.

All of the stories in this book really happened; not one was made-up. I did compress some timelines, and a few times changed who was actually involved in a story. As incredible as some of the tales may seem, they were all real, and are based on my diaries and the detailed indelible impressions left in my mind by the many remarkable experiences and people I encountered in India.

INDIAN SUMMER

A new day

Cold dawn snowflake stars

Tattered men

Wrapped on shop porches

Come alive

The sun rides into settled yellow dust

Sparkling drops of cold disappear

Near scattered straw dung fires

Tattered men come alive

They came

Walking

Carts pulled on wheels centuries old,

Buses cycles no longer new

To market

Cows and people

Hesitated

Moved on

Dodging

Each other, a ditch, a pile of dung

Yellow dust mingled with the coughs of bent old men

Forgotten children squatted on the sides of streets

Invisible women

Baskets on their heads

Weaved through pockets of men

The sun peered hotly on empty streets

A cyclops chasing men into holes

Oblivious children

Walked in the dust

Dusty legs dusty feet

Lost to contrast

Disappeared

They came

Again

Sun downing in the dust

Walking

Carts on wheels centuries old,

Buses cycles no longer new

Music lights blaring

Tattered men come alive

Red clouds flashed across the sky

A familiar chill returned to the air

Saturn rose in the distant east

An ironic unblinking stare

Patches of gray blankets

Blended with the dust

With the gray wooden shops

The streets are gone

A lonely light catches flies

Peering on a desolate patch of yellow dust

Silence settles with the chill

Somewhere lost in black

Shadows in the dark

Tattered men huddle on shop porches

Waiting to sleep

Waiting for the drops of cold

Waiting for the straw dung fires

Waiting to come alive

Art Frankel, Anavatti, 1966

PROLOGUE

(Summer, 2010)

I WALKED DOWN THE JETWAY to the Boeing 747 and took a sharp left as I entered the plane. I had done the flight from New York to India many times over the past four decades, but only in the last few years had I splurged on a business class seat.

The India I was traveling to was a very different place than when I arrived forty-four years ago as a young, idealistic Peace Corps Volunteer. Over the decades I had watched India transform itself from a sleepy agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse, so dynamic, so evolving, so complex, that no one trip was ever the same. My prior trips to India over the years had been to big cities like Agra, Bombay, and Bangalore. I loved being in India, but never really felt at ease in these big cities. Their frenetic pace of life was submerged under the converging waves of old and new India, crashing into each other.

The lights dimmed and I turned my seat into the semblance of a bed, but I could not sleep. In all my journeys to India since leaving the Peace Corps in 1968, I had not gone back to what had become the essence of India to me: Anavatti, the rural village where I lived when I first arrived. This village and its people had lovingly introduced me to the rhythm of rural Indian life, drawing me into their culture in ways that were indelibly imprinted on my soul.

I often wondered if Anavatti had been swept up in the wave of industrialization and change. Would anyone remember me? Did my work there have any impact? Was my mentor and friend Chandverappa Gowda still there, and his seven adorable daughters? Did he finally have a son?

The truth is, over the years I had been afraid to return to Anavatti.

But this trip would be different.

After forty-four years, I was going back—back to Anavatti, back in time to where it all began.

CHAPTER 1

Getting Out of Dodge

(September, 1966)

I STEPPED OFF THE BOEING 707, a brutally hot September sun reflecting off its gleaming sides. It must have been over one hundred degrees at the New Delhi airport, and it was still morning. The overpowering smell of kerosene and urine hit me in the face. I stopped dead in the baking heat at the top of the airplane steps, remembering the story that was told of a Peace Corps Volunteer who arrived in India: He stepped out of the plane, took one pungent whiff, and refused to get off. There was no way I was going to be like him. I purposely took in a few more deep breaths, and descended the steps onto the baking tarmac, feeling its heat through my shoes as I walked quickly into the dilapidated terminal building.

Brown was the predominant color inside—benches, floors, the soft brown hues of the Indians. I followed the crowd to immigration: slow and hot, long lines, and no air conditioning. I was the only Peace Corps Volunteer in the dingy terminal. My Peace Corps group of forty volunteers had preceded me to India by two weeks. I was left behind because my local draft board in Missouri, in its omnipotent wisdom, had turned down my request for a draft deferment. Local draft boards almost always allowed deferments for volunteering in America’s esteemed Peace Corps, created after John F. Kennedy challenged his countrymen: Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. I had heeded Kennedy’s call for many reasons. I truly did want to save the world; growing up in my extended liberal family had made sure of that. I also wanted an adventure before I had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. And I was vehemently opposed to the Vietnam War. It was 1966. If I could be deferred two years, surely the war would be over. Students of history now know how stupid that assumption was. It’s not that I was against war in principle, as my dad had fought in the big one, World War II. But I had to believe in a war to risk my life and kill people. Bring on the Nazis, not the Viet Cong. This belief system, of course, did not sit well with draft boards, or at the Pentagon.

The Kennedy association with the Peace Corps did not deter the draft board in St. Louis from turning me down even though every other guy in my Peace Corps group had been deferred. The informal deal between the Peace Corps and draft boards was that volunteering would allow a two-year deferment and then they could take you. This deal was not national policy, but a handshake between two governmental agencies. My local draft board wanted me now, and I received my deferment denial about two months into the four-month Peace Corps training program in Brattleboro, Vermont. No problem, I was told. Simply appeal the denial to the Missouri state draft board. Two days before my group was to leave for India, I got a letter stating I had been turned down by the state draft board. Worse yet, the state board had denied my appeal by a 4–0 vote, the rule being, as their letter carefully explained, there had to be at least one vote in my favor in order to appeal the denial to the national draft board in Washington, DC. The four-zip vote left me with no further appeal rights. I was in a state of shock, with Vietnam staring me in the face. Should I escape to Canada? Refuse to serve and do jail time? Try to conjure up some symptom that would get me the coveted 1Y medical deferment? My group left for India, and I flew to Minneapolis to stay with my latest girlfriend, Helene, waiting for the nervous breakdown that I was sure would come soon.

Unbeknownst to me, some Peace Corps official hand-carried my dossier to the national draft board in Washington, arguing that they had spent $20,000 training me (big bucks in those days), asking them to override the state and local boards and give me the two-year deferment. Two weeks later I was in Minneapolis sitting in my girlfriend’s grungy student apartment, staring mindlessly at the TV when the phone rang. It was someone on the line from the Peace Corps’s Washington office, yelling into the telephone.

The national draft board has granted your deferment over the objections of the Missouri state and local boards. There’s a ticket to India, via JFK, waiting at the Minneapolis airport for a tomorrow morning flight, he said, and we want you to get out of Dodge before the Missouri state board has a chance to react to Washington’s override.

I have to leave tomorrow morning? I asked, dumbfounded by this turn of events.

Absolutely! he replied breathlessly, They are not going to be happy about this, and we want you out of the country before they get a chance to appeal.

The next morning I grabbed my stuff, called my parents to say goodbye, and raced to the airport. Helene and I tearfully parted, and I was on my way to India.

That’s how I ended up in the baggage claim area in the New Delhi airport, exhausted and alone. After an interminable wait, my baggage came. Profusely sweating, I walked out of the terminal into a scene that no books, movies, or lectures could have prepared me for—the chaos of city streets in India. The terminal sat aside a paved road with red-yellow buses spewing smoke, roaring and stopping; noisy, three-wheeled auto rickshaw passenger motorcycles speeding by; little black and yellow taxis lining up for fares; people in cars looking for friends and relatives; nicely dressed chauffeurs waving signs high to attract their customers. Hundreds of people were attempting to leave the area at the same time, some lining up, some not, all competing for whatever mode of transportation was available. It was like a frenetic scene from a silent movie, everything moving at fast forward. Eventually I managed to get a taxi to take me to the Peace Corps office in Old Delhi, literally being the old part of New Delhi.

That first taxi ride in India was an existential experience in facing death. The streets were crowded with all sorts of motorized vehicles, people, and yes, many, many cows. These omnipresent cows were whizzing by, or should I say, I was whizzing by the cows, along with small restaurants, blaring Indian cinema music, and colorful open storefronts. There were no rules of the road that I could discern, except to go as fast as possible, play chicken with whatever was in front of you, and not hit anything before you reached your destination. I closed my eyes with each impending crash, for any good that did. Old Delhi was old, with narrow and congested streets, and buildings that offered occasional shade from the hot, rising morning sun. It was not anything like the pictures I had seen of modern New Delhi. The shops almost touched the road, looking old and tired. Their first floor storefronts were under apartments, not higher than three or four stories, with dusty red bricks and gray wood facing the street. There were no sidewalks, just people, vehicles, and cows, dodging each other in a chaotic choreography.

The Peace Corps office was a small one-story building in a dirt compound behind a gated red brick wall. There were a few palm trees and colorful red flowers, but they couldn’t compete with the yellow dust motif. I walked into the Peace Corps office and introduced myself to the American woman nearest the front door. She had no idea who I was. After some inquiry among her colleagues, still nobody knew who I was. Apparently I was not expected. However, after I described my saga and mentioned the name of my program, India 29, some lights went on. They told me to check into a nearby hotel where the Peace Corps had an account, and they would get hold of Washington. India is literally halfway around the world from America, so when it is morning in India, it is evening in Washington, which is why getting in touch with people during business hours in either country is off sync.

The hotel was an example of basic old India. The entry looked like a dilapidated Victorian living room, featuring well-worn furniture and lamps. There was a distinct odor of incense combined with an ancient smell, not unpleasant, but distinct. My room on the second floor overlooked a walled compound where occasional taxis and auto rickshaws slowly crept in to pick up or leave passengers. The bed was literally a wooden platform with some kind of thin, stuffed mattress on it, made up with coarse, dirty-white sheets, a small hard pillow, and a light, threadbare cotton blanket.

The most remarkable aspect of the room was the bathroom. I had been prepared for it in training, but no matter, it was still sobering. It was a little, gray, plastered five by five room with a concrete floor through a door off the bedroom. There was an eighteen-inch oval hole on one side of the room with a foot-sized step slightly raised on each side of the hole. This was not your average hole; it was the Indian equivalent of a toilet—the latrine. Doing a number one was not a problem, at least for men, as long as your aim was good. For women, it was a lot harder, and was the same degree of difficulty for both sexes when doing a number two, requiring good balance along with leg and back strength. One had to pull one’s pants down to the feet (dress or sari up), put a foot on the raised step on each side, and then squat down to straddle the hole. To balance yourself, you had to hold onto your knees, because you did not want to put your hands on the floor to hold yourself steady. For us Westerners, this was an acquired skill. For Indians, it was no big deal. In training, we had made these kinds of toilets, and had to use them periodically for practice. If it took too long to do a number two, you needed to ask a friend to help hold you in the required squatting position until done. Clearly, this system was not ideal when one was constipated or had the runs.

To make matters worse, once you were done, there was usually no toilet paper to wipe yourself with. In this bathroom there was some very coarse toilet paper, but in most traditional Indian hotels and homes, there was none. Indians use the water method. You take a little jug called a lota to the latrine, which looks remarkably like an American spittoon, and fill it from a nearby water bucket. After doing the number two, you hold the lota a little above your backside with the right hand, and start slowly pouring water down your crack. Simultaneously, you cup the left hand behind yourself to catch the water, continuing to use this left hand like toilet paper to wipe yourself clean. Then fill your lota again with water and pour it into the latrine hole, a manual way to flush the toilet. While this may sound disgusting to the Western mind, it’s actually very sanitary, if you thoroughly wash your hands afterward with soap and warm water—or so our Peace Corps trainers repeatedly told us. This is the reason why in India one’s left hand is never used to eat or touch another person.

Better Indian hotels also had a sink with hot and cold running water in their bathrooms, and a handheld shower nozzle. This room did, and I took a hot shower almost as soon as I acclimated to my room, being careful not to open my mouth as the water streaked over my face. I washed with a brown bar of sandalwood soap, which had a strong, soapy smell nothing like sandalwood.

Because of the jet lag, sleep was impossible, my body being twelve hours off. I found my packed sandals, called chappels in India, and went into the streets to explore.

The first thing I noticed was the incredible number of people walking on the street, most appearing like they knew where they were going. Men generally had on traditional Indian clothes, like the loin cloth Gandhi wore, called a lunghie, with a traditional cotton shirt called a juba. Some men were wearing dhotis with their jubas. Dhotis looked like a straight skirt wrapped around the waist, which could be worn to the ankles at home, or pulled up to the knees for work. The women were dressed in saris, with a smattering of what was known as Punjabi dress, tight-legged slacks with a long embroidered blouse. There were also some Muslim women in the walking crowds wearing black bhurkas covering their faces. Men wearing Western clothes also rushed by with white shirts and dark slacks, probably businessmen or civil servants. What was striking was the proliferation of bright and faded colors in a myriad of amazing designs. In this first view of the streets, I could tell the rich from the poor by whether the color of their clothes was faded or bright. There were also many children on the streets, barefoot boys in dirty shirts and shorts, girls in threadbare long dresses.

The scene was a curious blend of fast and slow motion. People were moving quickly, but some were stopped, carefully shopping at one of the many spice, fruit, or flower vendors facing the street, or snack carts scattered everywhere. The buses, cars, and auto rickshaws moved at their frantic pace, contrasting with cow-drawn carts moving at a cow’s pace. People-drawn carts piled high with goods were also moving slowly down the streets. I had been told to expect wandering cows all over India, and there they were. Who owned these cows, and how did their owners find them at the end of the day? Perhaps they were like Lassie and returned home themselves, but I didn’t know if cows are that smart. There were some adults and children just sitting on the street, finding some corner or nook to shield them from the sun, avoiding the moving mass of people and animals, mostly slumped over, looking hungry, tired, and sad.

During Peace Corps training we were taught about the miserable sanitation conditions in India. In fact, our particular group, India 29, was focused on teaching better sanitation. All the training in the world could not have prepared me for this frontal assault on my senses. Indescribable piles of garbage were dispersed along the sides of the black asphalt street, mingling with puddles that even the sun could not overtake. Many of these puddles were being fed directly from shop pipes, and what was coming out of those pipes was not clean water. The flies, like black house flies that plague American picnics, were everywhere, swarming around things they found attractive, particularly fruits, sweets, and puddles. There were not only pockets of filth, but pockets of smell. As I walked past fruit and spice shops, their fascinating pleasant odors surprised me, contrasting with the smell of urine and feces that seemed to float by in bubbles of stink. Several times I saw men peeing or pooping in alleyways; no one seemed to notice. In a couple of the streets there seemed to be some type of sewer system in front of the shops. These sewer conduits were not open, but covered with gray slabs of rock, looking like a narrow sidewalk. Unfortunately, there were many cracks between the slabs, where odors came out and flies went in.

After a couple of hours of wandering the streets, I was overwhelmed and exhausted. Some of it was obviously from jet lag. But in a short time I had experienced unbelievable contrasts in people, smells, colors, and sounds. When I applied to the Peace Corps, I had asked to be sent somewhere in the world that was more different than anything I had ever known. In my first afternoon in India I realized I got what I asked for. I was hooked.

Tired as I was, I had to eat. There were more basic health survival rules to observe: no foods that have not been well cooked; no leafy vegetables; only fruits that could be peeled. If we soaked taboo fruits and vegetables in a permanganate solution, then we could eat them, but this was obviously not possible outside of the home. No drinking water that had not been boiled for fifteen minutes; carbonated drinks, beer, and hot tea were okay.

I entered the hotel restaurant and sat down at a table covered by a stained white cloth with a doily edge. Tarnished metal utensils and a folded dirty white cloth napkin completed the setting. Ceiling fans moved the air, creating a warm breeze covering about ten tables, with a few occupied by single Indian men. The food selection was pretty limited, but the menu was written in both Hindi and English, so I recognized some of the dishes. I was learning an Indian language called Kannada, which is spoken only by the people of Mysore State in South India. Whatever remedial language skills I had learned in training were useless in all of North India, including New Delhi. Of course there were no meat dishes on the menu, as very few Indians eat meat. I ordered some kind of vegetable curry with curds (yogurt) on the side, which came with spicy lime and mango pickles. I didn’t expect there to be rice, as I had learned that rice is not part of North Indian cuisine. Instead I expected some type of wheat bread with their curries, such as the naan that came with this meal.

The utensils on the table did not look clean. Had they been washed? Even in American restaurants you heard stories about how dishes are just rinsed and used again. Looking around at the other diners, I noticed all of them were using their right hands to eat. Based on the sanitation standards I had seen during my walk, I decided to thoroughly wash my hands and eat my meal Indian style—with my right hand, as I had been taught. I watched as people at nearby tables cleanly scooped up their curry sauce as if their fingers were a soup spoon, but I just couldn’t do it. My whole hand was covered with curry by the time I finished eating. The trick was to cup four fingers together, using them as sort of a spoon to scoop up the food, the thumb acting as the closer, pushing the food into your mouth. This is was not hard for bigger pieces, such as chunks of vegetables, but watery curry sauce and yogurt were another story, not amenable to my porous fingers. I had to use the naan to soak up the curry sauce like biscuits sopping up chicken gravy. I didn’t see my dining companions laughing at me, but they must have been amused by the crazy American who was trying to eat like them. Seeing my plight, the waiter provided me a finger bowl to wash my right hand. I went to my room, washed my hands again, brushed my teeth with a carbonated cola drink, and collapsed into my stuffed mattress bed, passing out on the hard pillow.

I slept twelve hours and woke up at 9:00 a.m., looking for something familiar for breakfast. I headed back to the hotel restaurant and found fried eggs, toast, and butter on the menu. The bread didn’t taste very good, but Indian chickens lay the same eggs as American ones.

Back at the Peace Corps office, they had received a teletype about me during the night (day in Washington). The staff had arranged for me to fly to Bangalore in South India on a late afternoon flight, where I was to be met by John, the USA training director of my India 29 group. He had accompanied the group to India and was leading a two-week in-country orientation near Bangalore. Finally, I would be back with my fellow volunteers. I can’t say I enjoyed my first day in India, but I had been thoroughly intrigued.

Coming out of the Bangalore terminal to the airport arrivals area, I was met by a crowd waving madly to attract their disembarking relatives. Somewhere in this throng, John was supposed to be waiting for me. It was dark, but I easily found him waving behind the arrivals fence, the only white person in a sea of Indians. After two harrowing weeks, starting with being drafted, left behind, then suddenly yanked back from that abyss and rushed to India, I was exhausted, overjoyed, and mostly relieved. I was finally where I was supposed to be and who I was supposed to be: an American Peace Corps Volunteer in India.

CHAPTER 2

In the Beginning

May, 1966

IT WAS LIKE GOING TO summer camp, but the kids didn’t arrive on a big yellow school bus. Some arrived by taxi, some parents dropped their children off, and a few actually hitchhiked in. The camp was a few miles from Brattleboro, Vermont, the site of the Experiment in International Living, a nonprofit that brought people together from around the world. They had rented out their camp to the Peace Corps for the four-month summer training program, a hilly forested area with grassy meadows surrounding the buildings. As each volunteer arrived, John, the training director, energetically came to greet them, followed by one of the staff who guided each new arrival to an assigned cabin. John was in his early thirties, a little stocky, with a round, rosy face and sandy hair combed neatly to one side. From what I could see, the staff were mostly East Indians, and I was guided by a very thin Indian man who introduced himself to me as Jatin. His angular face was well lined, with short, white-gray hair, maybe in his early fifties. He deferentially offered to carry my luggage, talking to me in the lilting Indian-English accent I would become so familiar with and learn to emulate.

Each cabin was divided into four small rooms with two beds and a central bath. The rooms were primitive, like most camp cabins, but clean. Cabins were scattered around a central barnlike dining hall, where we were told to gather before dinner. As I unpacked, my roommate, Stephen, showed up. He was from somewhere in the Midwest, thin, dark-haired, sporting a black goatee, and easy to talk to. Like me, he was a recent college graduate with a major that was in no way connected to any practical skill. As we unpacked, Stephen and I conversed in a happy state of ignorance, having not a clue about what would be expected of us in the next four months.

That evening all sixty-five potential Peace Corps Volunteers assembled in the barn, which was set up with chairs as a meeting room. Food was cooking somewhere off to the side; a pleasant, spicy aroma filled the air. We sat facing a row of staff members, mostly Indians whose brown textures contrasted with the white Americans sitting near them. John started by introducing himself as the director of our India 29 group, the person who would be in charge of the training program, stating: "The