One more day in Delhi, Lodhi Gardens

A Muslim refugee camp in Old Delhi, during the Partition era.

The Partition. I mentioned it before. The Partition, the seismic moment in Indian history. I talked to Leon about it, and I wanted to ask Sheila too, but somehow in a subtle way, like I couldn't just grab her by the shoulders. Shout, HOW ABOUT THAT PARTITION. I hope you know what I'm talking about. The nation arbitrarily torn into two parts. The mass exodus of Hindus from what was now called Pakistan, and Muslims from India. It is hard to imagine now but Pakistan used to be as Indian as India itself. Even today (like so many world conflicts) the differences between the two nations people are insignificant, the similarities enormous. As a a friend of mine said to me: "Whenever I went and lived overseas, most of my friends were Pakistani. Once you're overseas, you realize pretty fast fast that Pakistanis and Indians are the same people, there's no point in denying it, you have so much in common..."

Do you know that I don't know a single Pakistani? They are, so I hear, very common in the UK. And pretty much non-existent in the US.

And the Partition was a tragedy, a tragedy of epic proportions. Around 12.5 million people displaced and on the move. No one is quite sure how many people died in the inevitable fighting, but estimates range from a 100,000 to a million. The division of land between the two states was often arbitrary or poorly thought out: Partition is one of the reasons why Kashmir is such a mess today - combine a majority Hindu population in the Jammu region and a majority Muslim one in the Kashmir valley? You're going to have problems. Anyhow. Fighting on the streets, friends lost forever. Even the language got messed about. (Leon, remembering the day when he learned to speak Hindustani up in Mussorie, instead of Hindi). Another irony: some of the oldest archaeological sites in India are in Pakistan, in the Punjab. Gandhi was against the Partition. No one seemed to listen to him.



That evening, Sheila and I set off for one last walk around Lodhi Gardens. My favorite place in India.

(When I first came here: I went to one of the more secluded tombs, and was all alone (so rare) in India. It was my last few hours in India, I was headed to the airport right after. And I watched the green parrots and thought to myself, "When will I see this again, when?"
And reassured myself, "It will be soon, must be soon. Within two years, which is all I have left of school."
And do you know - I did it).

I asked her about the Partition.

"Ah, I remember," she said, as we begin our loop around Lodhi Garden. The sky is pink and birds coming down, the sun so distinctly Indian, a sun that can be found nowhere else. "My sister and I went to the Woodstock School every day, you know - we lived in Landour. There was a sweet old man who used to sell lovely bangles and jewelry, on the way to school. We loved to buy those beautiful things, and sometimes our mother would get them for us. He was a Muslim man - I guess we knew that. It wasn't anything important, then. He was very kind, a lovely person.



Partition happened, and the fighting happened, you know all that. My mother, terrified. She tried to shield us from the worst of it, and she mostly managed. But - we went to school one day, I suppose, and the little man wasn't there. And my mother - she told my sister that he had moved, had gone away.

Of course, he had been killed, murdered by the Hindus. We found out about it all at school. It hit my sister the hardest. She cried for days and days, couldn't understand at all."

Like anyone could.

"I remember the violence, too, in the eighties, with Indira Ghandi and all. Your grandfather, too. Living in Berlin, right after the war. And the Great Depression. He saw things, too

Baldev, too. He's from Peshewar. His father, my father in law - he was a popular dentist there. So they didn't let him leave after Partition. They wanted him around. That kept them relatively safe, even not being religious. He never spoke Hindi, as a child. Just learned Urdu."

She though for a moment. Green parrots in the trees, and an ex-pat couple jogging bouncily around the trails perimeter, and the air going pinker and more divine by the moment. The tombs glow this time of night, as if backlit, and the remnant of blue tile on their fronts become intensely colored.

"Have you ever seen violence? Real violence?"

No, I said, no, not at all, not like you and my grandparents, not the world you four occupied.


"Well, that's good. It's the real world, maybe. But you don't have to experience so much, not just yet. Maybe Cambodia will be like that. "

She ran into a friend of hers, a very old looking Indian woman with the particular carriage of one who has led a life of stone cold bad-assery. We exchanged greetings, and continued our stroll. I love it when this happens because then Sheila always tells me all about the person we just met. She didn't fail me.

"That woman - her husband was diplomat to the pope. She had me over for lunch one day, and told me a story, a wonderful story. She had an audience with the Pope, and the Vatican naturally requested she wear a hat, and gloves, and stockings, something like that. Of course, she wondered. How would she do that with a sari? It would look absolutely strange. She was no push-over. She covered her head with her dupatta, and put her hands in her dress instead of wearing gloves. "This is appropriate for Indian dress," she explained to the Pope, when she appeared.

Well, he certainly wasn't going to argue with her.

Her family - her one son - he shaved his head in college. Some philosophical thing. And her husband, his father. Well, he refused to talk to him for 8 years, because of this silly thing. She finally broke down the wall, she did it. "This is stupid," she said, to both of them. And it did work. She's like that. The husband is dead now, I think.

The son - he was a lawyer, or something - he loved Mussorie, he wanted to retire there like everyone does. He made a lot of money, so he bought a nice place there, when he was middle-aged. And what do you know. Maybe his second night there, he died. All alone, his family all back in Delhi. He just had a heart attack, unexpected and sudden. He was quite young.

I guess the moral is, you might as well live as you please, now. There's no use in waiting."

(How many times have I heard that from family and older mentors, that particular advice. My grandfather, regarding his bourbon at 6:00 PM, sitting in the leather chair I know so well. "You might as well. You could get hit by the beer truck tomorrow. You might as well." )



We went back to the house for dinner. Baldev had finally come down - I suspect a big grudgingly - from Mussorie, and it was good to see him again, him and his curious electric-blue eyes. Like my grandparents and like Sheila, he carries the same aura of sheer gravitas about him.

"I know I'm not a Hindu," Sheila said, "not really. But, there was this one time." (Pouring me yet another drink).

I said I'd go to this temple, if Rajeev got well. And he did, so I went with my friend. I was dutiful about it. We got to the airport - they assigned us this nice young soldier, to accompany us. We couldn't get a jeep up there, the roads were out, so we needed to walk. He looked at me in my salwar and said, "Mrs. Lal, can you make it?" And I said, "Well, I'm from Mussorie. I guess I can try."

I got up there, and the shrine is in this cave, it's quite popular. It's like re-entering the womb, it's really slippery. That's the idea. You crawl through corriders, and caves. You can't go out the same way you came in. In the central area - it costs a lot of money to do puja there, or stay there a while. I ran into this group of people, Gujaratis I think, and they had paid a lot of money to do this puja. So they let me into their group: "Ah, you're my sister, you're like my sister." And I go, "Uh, okay, I' m your sister." So I get to see this - very expensive puja, i get to stay in there for a while.

I was going out, and I passed by this very tall woman, over six feet tall, and dressed all in white. I remember her sari was very long, and I couldn't see her feet. She looked almost lost - she was going the wrong way, and you shouldn't do that. But you're not supposed to correct others in temples. They're places of worship, in the end, you do do what you want to do. She had the most beautiful face, as I recall. I thought it was strange - you don't see lots of over six foot tall women in India. I told my mother about it - she was a hardcore Hindu - and she laughed at me. "Oh, Sheilie - that was obviously the Dara. You saw her, it was her. "

"Well, the Dara is very beautiful, then," I said. Another friend of mine - they say it was a hallucination, that I wanted to see her. So I willed myself into "seeing" something. They're probably right. But it makes a good story, doesn't it?"



I took some photographs of them for my grandparents. I got the two of them connected on Skype. (They are both remarkably technologically savvy). That's the power of technology: get two couples who have known each other forever and live on opposite sides of the world, talking on video phone for the first time in years. Cynics about technology and its supposed evils might want to stop and consider that.

I was headed to the airport early that morning: off to Bagdogra. We all said goodbye in the rather manful fashion of our respective families. I reassured them I'd be back (I would). They assented (they would). I said goodbye to the dog, and was sent off with a Ferro Rocher chocolate, and then went to bed early.

Delhi: Auntie Sheila and Why I'm Here

Auntie Sheila, the Force of Nature. I guess every kid has one growing up, a semi-mythological figure. Often-discussed and referred to in all the family annals, the stories they tell about the times They Went to India. Auntie Sheila figuring large in the adventure stories, the happy memories, everything I ever got told about India. Without her around, I wouldn't be in India. Might not even care about it. I guess you could call Auntie Sheila the tractor beam.

Auntie Sheila is a friend of my grandparents, a very good friend. Sheila's husband, Baldev, worked at Dow Chemical at the same time as my grandfather did, back in the seventies. He and my grandfather hit it off in one way or another, and then all four of them hit it off one way or another, and they became friends. Good friends. My grandparents life-long love affair with India must be directly credited to the Lals: they offered a native guide, impeccable companionship. The stories I heard originated from their travels, together. Trekking in Kashmir and a private train through the jungle. Rajasthan and Mumbai. They sat me down and told me all about it over and over. They have a table in their house with a lot of objects on it from all over the world - they did live in nine countries - and when I was small they'd pick them up and tell me the stories. (You fools! Didn't you realize you were creating that most useless of beasts, the travel writer? Couldn't you see?!)

Auntie Sheila came to visit once, with Baldev. I guess I was four or five. I remember she told me a story about a crocodile and a monkey, and that she brought me Kashmiri boxes with tiny, delicate paintings on them. The Kashmiri boxes, then, holding my own origin point, something within them that lead me here. You love India, or you loathe it. Perhaps I was programmed in the love direction, and had little real agency in the matter.

We met in 2008, during my first stint in India. She picked me up at the airport in the Lacoste shirts she favors, and took me by the hand- her hand very small and adorned with rings. Shorter then me and very slim. She, like all Indian women of a certain age, had kept her hair black. "You look just like Caroline!" she said, her voice the particular, resonant purr of the Delhi elite. (When I first heard the Delhi accent I thought they were fucking with me. No one could possibly speak in such an exquisite parody of British high toned speech. And it is true). I spent a week or so in Delhi and let her take me by the hand a lot of places: Humayuns Tomb. The Golf Club, where she is a member, and where we would eat tandoori items and drink whiskey and talk about human culture. Neither of us really approved. We both liked Bob Dylan and Peter Matthissen and zoology.

Sheila is among the finest people there are to talk to. She's read just about everything, and has been in the middle of many things too. Has traveled the world and met all manner of interesting people. You give her a prompt and off you go. I learn hundreds of things from her. I feel inclined to take notes when we sit down on the couch or at the India International Center and discuss things, but I guess that would be gauche.

She's a snob, that's for sure. My grandparents have got it too. It's part of what they are. A product of age and considerable experience. Both Sheila and Baldev and my grandparents exist in a constant commentary on how Things Were So Much Better when We Were Young. ("When we were alive," as my grandmother puts it, which I loathe). The world has declined and continues to decline. We were attractive when we were young, us two couples, and daring as well, glamorous if you put it that way. We're awfully hard to live up to. (If you're inclined to try, you poor bastard).

Snooty, but then again, maybe they've earned it. They did well. What a family mythology to have behind you, anyhow. Jet-setting. Vacations in Monaco and Kashmir. They all look fabulous in the photographs from back then, every one of them. This is the standard I've been set - a little bit more of why I'm here.

The Delhi moneyed are more British then the British - so is Sheila. She has a Labrador retriever and a fondness for imported Scottish whiskey, and she loves golf. Not that she's really British - only in the sense that the Indian elite have appropriated Britishness, have made it their own. "But I'm a Hindu," she tells me, a bit sneakily. "Baldev hates religion and thinks it's a load of rubbish, and I do too - mostly. But I'll die a Hindu." That first trip, I defied her, which took some doing, but I did it anyway. She didn't want me to go out at night at nightclubs with Some Boy and I did anyway. I'd vault over the fence of the India International Center, that bastion of glorious Indian intellectualism, and haul down a taxi and be off into the night. She knew it and I knew it too and we never spoke of it. That was tact, I guess. Some tact.

I arrive in Delhi this time around on the holiday that celebrates Krishna's birth, Krishna Janmashtami. She meets me at the India International Center, where she has put me up (they are painting the house) and she looks no different, seems unaffected by age. (What will we do when she does age? Will the universe cease turning?) "I'm terribly sure, but I feel ill," she said, her voice still purring in the Delhi-ite fashion. "I have over-extended myself of late." She takes me by the hand as is her wont and loads me into the car - she has succumbed to fashion and has finally bought herself a new one. She has also got herself a new driver. "The old one was an awful man," she says, dismissively. "I had to let him go." We'll talk no more about it.

We have dinner at her house. I've been seized by the first manifestation (on this trip) of severe nostalgia, of missing everybody, friends and family, the chairs in our backyard, the cigar factory in New Orleans, the dog, little things, big things, all of it. I sit on her couch while she arranges the pre-dinner whiskey and think lonesome and desolate thoughts, of what my friends are doing right now, of what my parents are doing right now (is the coffee maker on? are they asleep? who said-what-to-who?). Simba, the Labrador, comes into the room and forcefully sniffs my crotch.

One of Sheila's server-boys comes in, with the whiskey on a plate, and Sheila follows busily behind him. The server boys are from remote and impoverished villages in the Himalaya, near Mussorie - the hill station where Sheila was born. She sits down on the couch and she queues up some Bob Dylan, which we both like, and we look at each other from across the table.

"You look just the same," she says. Why is everyone saying that to me here?

"And so do you," I say. The table in here is arranged with the same small metal fish and Kashimiri figures that my grandparents have, and the paintings are similar too (Mughal miniatures and Rajasthani work) and even the colors the house is painted in are the same. So is the whiskey. My grandparent's living room in Florida and this living room in Delhi have somehow melded in my mind and are unable to separate.

Rajeev, her son, comes into the room. He also looks the same, like everyone else present. Hard to know where to begin with Rajeev. It's a story almost out of a Greek tragedy. Brilliant and handsome and had five girlfriends at once (as Sheila is fond of relating). St Stephens in Delhi, and the London School of Economics, and Ann Arbor after. Engaged to be married to a delightful and beautiful woman. Then: brain tumor. Age 23. He survives, but the surgery damages his brain - he'll never be the same again. He's 55 now and he gets around all right. Drives a car. Reads stuff. He comes in and out, like a radio when you play with the dials. "It's good to see you!" he says, and it's good to see him too. Sheila's daughter, Deepa, isn't here. In London, finishing up a masters degree in NGO work. The Eternal Student. Never married, but always securing degrees. Survived breast cancer and finished the degree all the same.

"Sheila has been so unlucky with those children," my grandmother says to me one day, when I am visiting in Florida. "Very unlucky."

Yes. To be Indian with no grandchildren? Intolerable. At least she has nieces and nephews. She manages a lot of other things besides family, too. Golf club meetings. Charity programs in small Nepali-speaking villages, up in the hills. Artistic events and neighborhood gatherings. "I've committed myself entirely too much," she says, draining her glass. "You have to say no, on occasion."

I doubt she will. She's superhuman. Baldev - he spends almost all his time up the hill in Mussorie now, away from Delhi, away from the heat and the confusion. The Commonwealth Games are coming up, but Sheila will probably stick around. She's overcommitted herself.

We have a lovely dinner. Always do, at her house. The grinning cook comes out with the food on silver platters, nudging the dog out of the way with a sideways motion of the foot. Tandoori chicken, rajma masala, daal, and curds. Rotis that are full of air, and puff out with a little explosion when you pierce them with a fork. "I would have had a fish souffle done up," she tells me, "But since you aren't in India all the time..." No, I'm not. Not yet. It's good to be back, even when it isn't.

All three of us begin eating with a fork and knife, and all three of us revert to our hands soon after. The Ten Fingered Fork, as Baldev calls it. Food tastes better that way. It's a habit I can't escape. The homesickness has decreased a little. Maybe I can stop missing boiled pork-chops and fires on the levee again. Can sink back into India again, all seamless like. Pomegranate seeds for dessert.

"Feel better," I tell her, as I hug Sheila and Rajeev goodbye, and head to the car where the driver awaits. "Feel better and see you tomorrow." A small command. I'm not qualified to give them, not yet. She stands in the doorway and watches languidly as the engine starts, short and slender, resolute. "Auntie Sheila is the most glamorous woman I know," my grandmother likes to say. (We went to a wedding once, near the Qutab Minar. She wore a stark white sari with embroidery and Mughal jewelry from long long ago. I was struck. How the hell does she do it?

This is truth. In her I feel a little less afraid of aging, maybe. A little less afraid.