Off to Pangla, at last, for what was supposed to be a 6 hour drive. We stopped after 1 hour in Mapsa. At the time I didn't understand why everyone was so gung ho to stop, but it was fine to get out and walk around, although my throat still felt awful. I was sitting on the right hand side of the back seat behind the driver. Vally was in the middle and when I put a small pillow under my left hip, it levelled out the seat enough so that I wasn't rolling into him. Clara sat on Vally's left. His mom and Clayton shared the front seat with the driver. We continued on into the night. About 2 hours later we stopped for thali at yet another roadside Udipi restaurant. It was fine, nothing extraordinary. It was 10 PM by this time and I saw that the floor was being wiped, with an incredibly worn out, filthy rag by a boy who could not have been more than 12. Another young boy was sweeping. I remembered that Udipi restaurants are notorious for their use of child labor. There was a huge Hindu family at another table, and I noticed that all of the women and children sat together separately from all of the men. We bought some cashews, which grow in this part of India. They come roasted and salted and they come with the papery hull on, like peanuts. They were the largest and best cashews I have ever eaten and I meant to bring some back with us, but I forgot.

Brief diversion to tell you about the Indian broom which looks like an enormously overgrown whisk broom whose handle has tripled in size while its straws, which are not bound below the handle, have grown by a factor of 8. The brooms are everywhere, and the sweeping is performed in short choppy strokes by the side of the last third of the broom. The sweeper has to bend over to do this, because long broom handles are not part of the design.

Anyway, back on the road-in a car with an unremarkable suspension and barely two-lane roads that varied from marginal to actively bad. On the open road, the basic technique for passing is to use the horn. visuals are okay too, I guess, but, as I mentioned before, there is nothing to stop a driver from passing on a blind curve because he sounds his horn and the oncoming driver is supposed to know that someone is coming. The driver's window is always open so that he can hear the horns, no matter what the temperature or how cold the passengers might be, although I don't know how this works during the monsoon. Deafness and driving are incompatible in India. I had brought pillows with me and tried to sleep through the trip. There had been some mention of "bottles" and I learned that there were 10 bottles of liquor stashed on the floor of the car, some in the front and some in the back. Goa has a very low alcohol tax, so liquor is very cheap there. In addition, they make a drink called cashew feny, which Vally describes as "a powerful experience even for someone used to drinking" and which is very popular. Many people get alcohol in Goa and bring it back home, sometimes to resell. To discourage this practice, there are checkpoints as you leave Goa and as you enter the neighboring states. There is a loophole, however. It is legal to bring liquor to the island of Daman which is nearby. Thus people get permits to carry liquor and then say they are going to Daman. It turns out the Vally's mother and Clara were carrying 10 bottles between them, but Tim had gotten them a permit. Still it wasn't quite legal and Vally's mother was nervous. She had done this trip before several times by bus and the checkpoint guards hadn't bothered to search the bus, but this was different. We got to the Goan border and told the guards that we had nothing and they let us go without a search. I said something about how we seemed to be pretty good at checkpoints. Little did I know. About 100 feet up the road was another checkpoint, this at the entrance to Karnataka, the next state. Moreover it was Xmas season when smuggling is at its peak.

When we stopped at the second checkpoint I was half asleep, my head leaning on a pillow against the side of the car. I was determined to stay that way so that no inadvertent gesture of mine would betray my companions. I heard the trunk open and everything being removed from the trunk which contained our luggage. I wondered if they were searching it and hoped that if they didn't find anything in the trunk, they would let us go. The whole thing was taking place in Kannada, so I had no idea what was being said. Then we saw the guards hauling away bottles from the trunk. Before we had much time to think about that, they came around to the side of the car and ordered Vally's mother out. The guard started rummaging on the floor and I heard the word "bottles" and although it was being pronounces "botlees" I knew what they were talking about. Then Clara was ordered out and some more bottles were removed. They opened my side and I indicated my pillow and backpack and said "I don't have anything you're interested in." I have no idea if they understood, but after patting the place behind me where the back of the seat joins the front, I became a non-issue. Vally's mom, during the search said something about having a permit which resulted in an angry tirade from the guard who said what Vally translated for me as "Don't tell me about the law, I know all about the law." Clara, by this time was waving a 100 rupee note under the guard's nose as he searched the car, while simultaneously trying to give the impression of maximal penitence, saying "I'm so sorry, this is the first time I've tried to do this, I didn't know," etc. The driver told Clara to cool it with the money, that is was premature and the guard would be insulted. Then the driver and the guards went off to negotiate. It was then that I found out that the driver had 17 bottles in the trunk, hence the importance of the stop in Mapsa. I began to feel sorry for him-like if we weren't along then maybe they would not have stopped us and he would not have lost his bottles. After awhile, the driver came back and got Clara for stage 2 of the negotiations. Vally gave Clara 300 rupees (about $9) and she went off to negotiate. A few minutes later she returned and said "They want 200 rupees more or else they'll confiscate the car." The deal was done. For about $15, Vally's mom and Clara got their bottles back, the driver lost his 15 bottles of cashew feny but was allowed to keep two bottles of wine and they let us go. The driver was upset. He said he had made this trip more than 50 times and had never had to pay more than a few rupees. Looking back on it now, I suspect that the fact that Vally and I were in the car may have elevated the price. The whole time I was sitting there I kept thinking "This is an experience you can't have as a tourist."

The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful, except that the driver had to readjust the clutch to make it work at all and he did not stop at the next two checkpoints, which were smaller, more local ones. Instead, he slowed down as much as possible and yelled (in Kannara, as translated by Vally) "My clutch is bad and I can't stop and I'm going to Udipi.' It worked. There was only one guard at each of the checkpoints and he had no vehicle, so there was no way to do anything about it. We got to Pangla at about 4 AM.

There is a P.S. to the story. The next day, when we spoke to the driver, we found out that there were 30 more bottles (plastic so they wouldn't rattle) in the doors that they hadn't gotten. I understood why the handles in the door weren't tightly screwed in.

The house in Pangla was built by Vally's grandmother, in about 1950, and grew in stages. It is masonry construction and the interior walls are painted in strong colors. Most of the house is on the straight part of an "L." Starting from right (towards the road) to left there are three small bedroom, the largest being the corner room at about 10X10, the rest being about 7X7 or so. Across the front of the bedrooms is a wide hallway called the altar room which in the original layout of the house is the room where Vally was born. To the left of the third bedroom is the dining room, about 8 X 12, with a big blue formica-topped simple table and a small sink in the corner on the hallway side. The hallway is part of the dining room, but resumes after that. Next to the dining room is the kitchen, very country with unfinished wooden table type counters on each side, a few open shelves, no real cabinets, a two-burner propane counter top stove. The refrigerator, which like every Indian refrigerator I saw is small by American standards, sits in the altar room. Next to the kitchen is the English bathroom. It has an interesting feature. The house was built before there was electricity. Therefore, on the left hand wall, back in the corner there is a huge, built-in, tilted iron water jug, capacity about 15 gallons. In the old days, when someone wanted a hot bath, a fire was started outside, under the water tank. To the left of this bathroom is a passive flush Indian-style toilet. To the left of this, across the end of the hall, is the door to the cow shed which is attached to the house. The cow shed is divided into two parts by the feeding trough. The cow stays in the back. While we were there, the servants slept on the concrete floor in the front part of the cowshed. The short part of the "L" parallels the road. It starts at the corner bedroom and comes forward with a small bedroom which is off the altar room. That's where we slept. The short part of the "L" consists of another small bedroom (Uncle Lawrence's) and the living room. Inside the "L", but outside the house, is a red-painted concrete patio with a low wide wall that encloses it on two sides. The third side has a bench which runs along the house. The patio is covered by a roof. We spent a lot of very relaxed time hanging out on the patio and the concrete was cool, especially when power was out, which is was from 6-9 AM and 2-5 or 6 PM.

Our bed in Pangla was twin-sized, and the thin mattress was cot-sized. We were parallel to the front wall of the house, under the window which helped. If the bed were free-standing, I think we would have had serious trouble staying up on it. The rest of the room consisted of a table (actually an improvement over the table in Goa, it was full height and twice the area) on the left and a wardrobe similar to the one I described before on the right. The actual floor space was probably 4X4. We also had one of those switch banks, an overhead fan and an outlet for our mosquito killer. There was shutter-like door. Clayton slept in the larger bed in the corner bedroom with Vally's mom.

There was a big brown cow and a two day old calf. The cow was taken out to graze during the day and the calf was left tied in the cowshed, so I got to visit with her. She was very innocent and sweet and liked to lick my hand. The cow was milked in the morning and night and after the night milking the calf was allowed to be with her. There was also a dog, named Rover, a thin, hyperactive brown-and-white creature who spends his entire life on a 4 foot chain tied to a coconut tree about 30 feet from the house. Rover's job is to bark and for this he gets to eat the leftovers, including a lot of rice. I petted him once, but petting desperate dogs, like giving money to beggars (more on that later) quickly becomes too much. There were two abandoned kittens, scrawny and half wild, that Clara had taken in. I was able to catch and pet the kittens but I didn't have time to "spoil" them. Cats here are not seen at pettable. There was also a large rooster and two small hens. There had been a third hen, and the rooster has not forgiven Clara for that. However, Pangla fest was coming up (a huge annual parish-wide feast) and the rooster's days were extremely numbered. He carefully spent a portion of every morning crowing directly under our window.

I had forgotten to mention Indian crows. Although we saw pigeons (later) in Delhi, mostly what you see is crows. They are the same size as American crows, but their bodies are a dark grey, with black markings on their heads. They are known for their cleverness and their noise. When we were in Bombay, we saw a pickup truck carrying sacks of rice. There was a man riding on the back, sitting on the sacks and leaning against the cab. There was a tiny hole in one of the sacks towards the back. We were entertained by the antics of a large crow who spotted the hole and undeterred by the fact that the pickup was in motion, took advantage of the opportunity, until the man, whose function had suddenly become clear to me, finally noticed.

The garden at the farm also grew some vegetables, mostly greens at that time and fodder for the cow. Although the yard was clean, the acre or two of land behind it where the gardens were was totally littered with trash-bits of plastic and foil. The made me very sad. Trash disposal seems to consist of throwing everything, including used mosquito killer pads, on the ground, and whatever the cow or the chickens don't eat seems to just stay there until it blows onto the land. Some trash is burned too, I guess, judging from the prevalence of noxious fumes.

In India there is a cadre of professional launderers (men) called dhobi wallah's. We never needed to use a dhobi, but I am told that they have a secret way of marking clothes so that even though they come to your house, pick up your clothes and dump them into vats with everyone else's clothes, somehow, at least so goes the myth, you always get your own clothes back. At Agra, we saw dhobis washing clothes in the river, beating them on stones and laying them out on the ground to dry. How they come out clean that way, I can't imagine. The guidebook suggested bringing extra buttons to replace those that get smashed on the stones if you are going to use the services of a dhobi. We did run into a couple of washing machines, although no dryers, but that was later.

We turned off the main road onto a back road-the one that went past the fisher women's market, and soon we were walking on a nearly deserted, although inhabited, country dirt road. I had been in India long enough to realize what a treat is was to simply take a quiet walk without any need to dodge vehicles of any sort. It was a magical walk at dusk. We stepped off the road and explored a huge black rock, the size of a large suburban lot, then we went back to civilization. If we had kept going in that direction for another mile or so, we would have come to the Arabian sea.

Uncle Lawrence, at 58, has retired from being the principal of a diocese-run college. The retirement age for government employees in India is 58. He has a Ph.D. in counseling from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and has longed to set up a counseling practice but has been thwarted by the bishop. I think he had finally gotten permission, but the bishop died and now it is up to the new bishop. I think in the meantime he has been made the procurer for a seminary, but he hopes to add a counseling center at a nearby diocese-run hospital. Uncle Lawrence was a warm and kind host. One thing that struck me was that when we asked him about family matters, and asked his perspective about things that happened, he did not make any judgements. At the same time, when we shared our observations about problems we had seen in the present, he totally agreed. He sent us home with a list of books he wanted from the states (including "Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved By You"). We volunteered a few more titles for his collection.

Anyway, we started off on our tour-bumping along in the Ambassador, down dusty roads. Our first stop was a nearby temple built by Madhvarcharaya who was a 13th century Indian philosopher. Actually, the building may date from a couple of centuries later, I forget. The temple is sort of visible from the house, and I started to realize that to some degree where there was a hilltop there was a Hindu temple. There were people living at the temple, ascetic-looking and simply dressed. I saw both men and women, but I don't know if both lived there. The temple is made of quarried stones. There was a very old, highly carved stone gateway arch at the entryway and brightly colored paintings on the outside walls next to the door. Hindu temples seem to consist of a large, enclosed or semi-enclosed roofed, pillar supported platform, with a central series of enclosed chambers in which the temple deity is kept. Outside the chambers, everything is very simple and semi dark. When we walked in (shoeless) there was a man naked above the waist, chanting while seated on a stone platform, about 8X8. We could see into the deity chamber and there was a man performing a ceremony. Since he was dressing the goddess, we supposed that he had performed a ritual cleaning. There were candles and incense and Vally remembers their having electric lights. There were other people wandering around, but I have no real idea what was happening. We were definitely the only tourists, and outside, as I took pictures, which we were told we were welcome to do, an old woman who spoke no English wanted to know where we were from.

A bit of Indian history. In the middle ages there were 3 prominent Indian philosophers: Madhvacharaya, Shankaracharaya and Ramanujacharaya. (Acharaya is a title which translates roughly as "enlightened holy sage.") Madhvacharaya preached the concept of an external God who if worshipped properly will take of things for us. Shankaracharaya said that we and God are one and that as we evolve we become more and more one with God. Ramanujacharaya, one the other hand, preached a kind of holographic God-that we are not exactly one with God but rather that God is like the sun and we are like the rays, that just like each ray has all of the properties of the sun, we each have all of the properties of God. Each then, to this day, has his own Hindu followers and temples.

Off to Udipi. We entered Udipi through a new, beautiful stone gate with carved Hindu motifs. Udipi is famous for the Ashtamata (asht=8) temple which is shared by 8 "mutts" which are the Hindu equivalent of dioceses, in some sort of rotating order. The mutts also have their own temples surrounding the main one. Krishna was supposed to have done something here, but I forget what, and Vally doesn't remember either. The area in front of the temple was a kind of town square, with vendors selling trinkets lined up across from the temple. There were cows everywhere (watch out!) and throngs of people. Also there were two huge (!) tall, top-heavy-looking, incredibly colorful and ornate chariots, one being decorated and showing its wooden skeleton, and one complete, that are used for religious festivals. They have a heavy wooden base and run on thick, wooden wheels which looked like they may have had metal rims but now it wasn't clear what they had. Vally says they are pulled by an elephant, but we didn't see the elephant. It was hot and people were crowding together to get into the temple just before the puja (prayer ceremony). We pushed in with everyone else. The inside was smaller than the other temple and had a more modern feel, and they gave away prasadam (food that had been offered to God) and there were people there whose job it was to sprinkle rose water on you (love offering suggested). I think I was too hot and overwhelmed to coherently record what was going on and we did not have the strength and time to stay for the puja.

We walked around Udipi a little bit and bought some palm hearts (eerwoll) from a vendor. I had seen them in a can, but had no idea what they might involve. They come from fruits that look like a cross between a small coconut and an eggplant. The vendor chops the palm heart open with a curved machete, exactly like the ones they use for tender coconut. Here they are called koythis-and we managed to bring one home with us. Once the outside part is opened, there are 3 or 4 fruits inside which must be related to the coconut because they reminded me, in texture, of tender coconut, and each had juice inside. With the point of the koythi, the vendor extracts the fruits and plops them into a plastic bag. We got 20 for about 10 rupees. To eat then you suck out the juice, peel the white outside skin and pop the rest into your mouth. They were okay, I guess.

We went on to Manipal which is famous for its large university and first rate medical school and hospital. As we drove around the campus, Uncle Lawrence explained that the whole thing was started by one very rich and visionary family. The university used to cater to wealthy foreign students whose qualifications were more financial than intellectual, but the government has now limited the number of such students to a very small percentage. I think the university has just started a branch in Indonesia. We drove up to a beautiful, if somewhat barren hilltop above the city which used to be a lovers' lane until a recent murder. Next we headed for the small town of Belle (pronounced Bellay) where the farm at Kattingere, the place where Vally lived until he was 11 and moved to the city is located. Currently, Vally's 94 year old paternal grandfather and his father's brother (there were 13 kids of whom 12 survived to adulthood) Bapu and wife Maushi, and one of their sons live there. Although we had intended to split our time between Kattingere and Pangla, Bapu wrote a letter disinviting me since in his rigid traditional eyes, and those of his priest brother on whom he is financially dependent, because we were each married before, we are not married now, at least to each other, and therefore living in defiance of the teachings of the church. That was very sad since it means Vally will never see his grandfather again. Instead we drove through Belle, another small shop-filled town, past scores of small children, some barefoot, walking home from school along the exact same road and in the exact same way that Vally did back then. We did a drive-by of the house, which is set on a small hill about 50 feet from the road, stopped at an old and not much used Hindu temple up the road, took some pictures then turned around and did another slow drive-by of the house.

There is a reasonably good bus system now, but I heard tales of how in order for Vally and his mother to visit Pangla, when he was really little, they had to walk 5 miles. Later there was a bus that shortened the walk to 3 miles. His mother also told of a time when Vally was small and needed medical attention because he had fallen and injured his leg and it wasn't getting better. She had to carry him to the mission hospital in Udipi, a distance of 10 miles-there was no other way. That may have been the time he was diagnosed with "bone TB" and required extensive treatment, although she was vague about what that really meant. When Vally was about 5 he got eosinophilia, which has symptoms like pneumonia. They called the village "compounder" who, in the olden days were the ones who mixed prescriptions for the doctors. This man must have worked under a doctor in the past, but at this point he dispensed medicine on his own. The compounder thought it was pneumonia and prescribed chest plasters. After two days, Vally was no better and was taken (I don't know how) to the mission hospital where the eosinophilia (caused by a parasite which enters the body through bare feet) was diagnosed and treated. The compounder, by the way, had 12 children, and we learned that every one of them has migrated to the US. Clara told us that checking the white count for elevations in the number of eosinophils standard preventive medicine in India.

By now it was lunch time, so we went to a city called Karkal for a thali at an Udipi restaurant. We went upstairs to the aircon. It was a fairly pleasant restaurant, except when power went out for several minutes, and we sat in complete darkness as the room temperature rose.

After lunch we headed for the nearby Jain temple. The temple is carved out of a single rock or something like that, and is reached by a climb up many stairs, also carved into the rock. It was hot enough so that I thought twice about the climb. At the top of the hill, in a large outdoor courtyard surrounded by high walls, there is a 13 meter foot statue of a naked Gomateshwar the founder of the Jain religion, also carved out of a single rock in 1432, but brought there from somewhere else. The legend has it that Gomateshwar stood and meditated naked in one position for so long that vines grew over his body, and he is so portrayed in the statue. There is some sort of ceremony performed, I think, every 10 years where they pour milk over the statue. We bought some postcards there, but somehow they didn't make it home with us. We took a lot of pictures. The Jain religion is so totally about non-violence that they do everything possible to avoid killing even insects. Anyway, the view from the top, outside the walls was great and we could see Hindu temples on the nearby hilltops.

Our final stop was Mudbidri which is another Jain temple, famous because it is supposed to contain 1000 pillars. We didn't count but there were a lot of stone pillars and they weren't identical. The basic principle seemed similar to a Hindu temple-covered stone platform, like a giant stage, although this one was much more elaborate. We saw a large group of Indian school children, probably about 12 years old, taking the tour. I realize now it was probably just one class.

As we toured the countryside, we kept seeing what would have to be called very fancy new houses, with elaborate curved masonry decorative feature. "Gulf money," said Vally. All of the Arab nations employ Indians to do both their professional and menial work, since few Arabs need to work to support themselves. Salaries in the Gulf are much higher than in India, although Indians don't make as much Europeans or Americans do. The whole time Vally was growing up, his father worked for Aramco in Saudi Arabia. He came home once a year for a month, although some years he did not come home at all. That is not the least bit unusual. With this money, he provided a modest lifestyle for Vally's mother and the (eventually) 6 kids, once they moved to the city, and also supported those who were at Kattingere, with enough left to blow on parties and expensive booze when he came home. After years in Bombay, Linda and Rodin and kids now have a much higher standard of living in Dubai, where Rodin works for the Bank of Dubai. Jobs in the Gulf are very tenuous, however and subject to the whim of Arab employers. Moreover, Indians have to leave by the time they turn 60, so typically people save their money to build or fix up houses to retire to in India.

That evening Vally really felt the effects of a day of driving on dirt roads with an open car window. He has chronic adult onset asthma, and needs to use an inhaler twice a day. Usually this treatment opens up his breathing quickly. That night it simply didn't work and he kept wheezing. We had no idea what to expect and I made sure that there was someone we could contact in an emergency. That afternoon a man appeared. It was Mani, Vally's best friend from his high school days in Nagpur. We had managed to tell him we would be in India and he had come, by bus, from Bangalore 9 hours away, finding the house based on directions which sounded something like "Take the bus to Shankarapara, ask to get off at the church and ask someone where the teacher lives." Although they hadn't seen each other in years, Mani and Vally reconnected immediately. Mani sat very close to Vally and touched him frequently. I think Vally had become unused to this sort of thing, but we saw it all the time-men hugging, walking down the street with their arms around each other. Only men and women touching in public is considered vulgar in India.

Mani is a Hindu. Its strange that in Hindu India I had gone so many days without getting to know a Hindu. I found Mani very sweet and very open. He is a chemical engineer and has worked at his current job for 6 years. It's time for a career move and he is planning to go to the Gulf. He is married and has a 6 year old son and a 2 year old daughter. His marriage was arranged. He had seen his wife once when he agreed to marry her, and had spent 2 days with her, on the train just before the actual wedding ceremony. His wife wants to work and he refuses to allow it, at least when their children are young. The 6 year-old goes to a mutt school and it seems to be a very progressive one. They have realized that children can't really concentrate on anything for more than 20 minutes at a time, so they change their classes frequently. Also, the school tries to educate the parents about the needs of their children. Mani is very pleased with his son's education. I discussed what I had seen about Indian child-rearing with Mani and he, too, agreed with my observations. I'll save them for another letter. Educated Indians are having small families, even the Catholics. Mani was sad about this. He would like to have more children, but feels that he can't afford to.

Anyway, by morning, Vally's asthma was no worse, but also no better and breathing took a lot of effort. The family were worried, and floating a theory of eosinophilia recurrence. Clara had a friend who was a doctor in Udipi, so we decided to see if we could find her. The driver came again, and even though after a day of touring we had decided to stay home, we were back in the car. Clara's friend was not to be found, so we found ourselves at the JMJ clinic. JMJ, we later realized, stands for Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Vally, Clara, Mani and I piled out of the car and went upstairs, in an old-fashioned elevator with a manual cage door, to the clinic. The elevator door opened onto a reception room, about 30 by 50 feet, with supporting pillars visible. There were windows across the front, and the reception desk, a large L-shaped wooden desk-height counter was to our left opposite the windows. There was a huge statue of, I think, the Virgin Mary and child in the front window. There were seats and vinyl-covered upholstered benches scattered around, either facing the window or facing away from it. There was no sign of a computer. We registered at the desk then sat and waited. I think Clara was friends with the clerk, so they had a good time chatting. Eventually we saw someone who took a history and then were sent out to wait again. I picked up the clinic newsletter which listed the staff. I remember that there were 3 homeopathic physicians listed on a staff of about 30 medical professionals.

India has 3 recognized systems of medicine: ayurvedic, western and homeopathic. People mix and match, depending on their theory of what is good for what. Vally's mother has arthritis and we were told that it was so severe that she could hardly comb her hair. She chose to seek ayurvedic treatment, and follows a regime involving giving herself and oil massage every day, and taking herbs. Periodically she goes for inpatient treatment. Although she was very stiff after the trip from Goa, she has clearly gone from not being able to comb her hair to being able to tie flowers. On the other hand, Chrissie is having trouble with his back and when we asked if he considered seeing a chiropractor, he didn't know what we were talking about. He is on muscle relaxants and wearing a back brace until the pain subsides and he is able to follow the exercise program that the doctor is going to recommend. Later we found out that he was feeling much better, and attributed his recovery to a special bracelet made of 5 different metals. There is a lot of faith in folk remedies too, and if you have a specific complaint, we can look up the appropriate remedy for you, because we managed to get a copy of "The Home Encyclopedia" which lists many of them and also includes household hints like using cucumber peels to get rid of cockroaches.

Finally, we went back up the hall which was between the elevator shaft and the desk and to see a real doctor. The hall was lined with examining rooms. The room was bare, with dirty-white colored walls, an old-fashioned examining table, a wooden desk in the corner and some chairs. It reminded me of a Norman Rockwell painting of a country doctor, except most of the subjects were Indian this time. The doctor, who was probably in his 30's asked if we wanted to do this in Konkani or English. We chose English. He took a good history, did a physical exam and asked Vally if he needed a shot of epinephrine. He declined. The doctor wound up prescribing a week's supply of virtually the whole arsenal of anti-asthma drugs: theophylline, salbuterol, bromelin and an antibiotic, all in pill form and writing an order for a blood test to rule out eosinophilia. Vally had already taken one of Clara's salbuterol's in the morning, and it had helped. Since we had to wait for the medicines and the test results, we left and went to the ultimate Udipi restaurant in Udipi, The Woodlands, for lunch. It was probably the nicest looking of the Udipi restaurants, and we had another thali (the "executive thali"-28 Rs, about 85 cents). Although the basic principle of thalis remains the same, the actual content of the small dishes does vary, even, I am told, from day to day in the same restaurant. North India, however, is where you need to go for the complex and subtle spices and large variety of dishes associated with Indian cooking.

We returned to a negative blood test and a collection of pills. Then we left to show the Krishna temple to Mani, who went inside while we wandered around outside. I realized that by now, Mani had become a family member. It also began to feel like one of our errand-laden Saturdays in the US, with everyone having some little bit of shopping to do. Mani wanted cashews. Clara wanted shoes. Clara also wanted to get some little clay dishes (picture very small clay dishes that you put under flower pots) and wicks to make some oil lamps to decorate the driveway for the parade which was going to take place that night. We were looking for a koythi, although we wound up taking Clara's. We bought some wooden kitchen spoons. Also, we tried to book a bus ticket for Mani's trip back to Bangalore. He wasn't interested in riding for 9 hours on uncomfortable seats in an unair-conditioned bus. We tried 5 different bus companies, but everything was booked. It began to feel like we were never going to get out of Udipi.

When we got back, power wasn't out, maybe because it was a Sunday, and we got to just relax for awhile.

There was a wonderful old woman who came to visit a couple of times. She was a cousin of Vally's mom. Her name was Kochu. She didn't speak any English, so I couldn't understand anything she said, but her presence was delightful. She was a small, white-haired old lady missing some teeth, but utterly spry with an incredibly gleeful look in her eyes. She never married, but instead worked as a nanny for a family in Bombay. Maybe she could be classified as an Indian Mary Poppins except I don't know that much about Mary Poppins. Now she is retired and all of her charges live in the US and when they came to Dehli to visit they insisted she join them there (and paid her way).

A lot of the time, especially in Pangla, but also in Goa, I couldn't understand the conversations around me. In Goa, everyone is the family, nominally, spoke English but it was "Hinglish," English sprinkled with a lot of Hindi phrases. In Pangla, many of the conversations were in Konkani. Words that don't exist in Konkani are borrowed directly from English, so I would understand a word every couple of minutes or so and have half an idea what or whom the conversation was about. Vally surprised lot of people who said "You haven't forgotten your Konkani!" Actually, he was surprised too because he had, but it magically reappears when he is in India. We bought a Konkani dictionary, also a Kannada dictionary and a Hindi dictionary.

The last day of our visit to Pangla, things were beginning to heat up for Pangla fest. There was a huge parade, from the church at Pangla to somewhere and back. Sunanda set up the coconut oil lamps that we had gotten in Udipi so that they outlined the driveway on both sides as the parade went by. We watched the people pass and we could predict the exact moment that each eyes-front parader's head would whip to the left as they spotted the lights. The effect of the lights was very beautiful. The marchers were segregated by gender and the children wore their communion dresses and suits. There was an amateurish brass band at the head of the parade and we heard them at the beginning of the parade and what was left of them at the end of the return trip almost 90 minutes later. Poor things!

Also, the household was working itself up to a cooking frenzy. Mounds of garlic and ginger were being peeled and rice was being ground. Meat was marinating. Clara needed to go to a neighbor's house to get the spices ground up to make the masala (=spice mixture). I guess the quantity was too great for whatever they normally used. So we headed off with her, in the dark, guided by a flashlight. We walked up the road and then along a trail to another farmhouse with a paved yard. The people who lived there knew Vally and were thrilled to see him. Another long conversation in Konkani ensued but this time I didn't feel so alone, because Mani didn't understand a word of what was being said either. This house was also masonry. Like Clara's house the walls were painted in a vivid blue. I seem to remember that the floor was concrete-floor red and the furniture was brown vinyl. There were some other chairs in a different, unrelated color. In Clara's living room, with a similar color scheme, there was a bright orange cloth thrown over the brown sofa. I may not have the colors exactly right, but the combinations weren't anything you have ever seen in the US. It made things seem a little bit surreal. The layout of the other house was typical of what I later saw in Nagpur, i.e., a jumble of rooms, with no hallways, so you have to go through one room, probably past someone sleeping in one of the beds to get to another, e.g., to get to the kitchen from the front door.

I am not sure exactly who lived in the house, although there were certainly several adults and a few children. There was one old woman who was visiting for Pangla fest. She used to live in the house behind Clara's but when her daughter married and her son-in-law moved in, somehow, they managed to get rid of her and put her into a nursing home. This maneuver did not improve the social standing of the daughter and her husband. The woman seemed quite healthy and capable to me. There was another old woman who was the matriarch of the house. She was very short, bow-legged, missing most of her teeth, had one bad eye and thin white hair, although she was perfectly alert. On the way home, I asked how old she was, guessing she must be at least 90. I was floored when Clara said she was 72. The words that came into my head were "worn out." That's what happens when you work hard all your life and have 10 or 12 kids. It was a shock.

Mani finally decided to take the bus to Udipi in the morning and take his chances on finding a good bus to Bangalore. He left before I woke up, but Vally waited in front of the church with him to flag down the bus. Our driver came and sat there, peeling garlic on the patio, while he waited for us to get ready. Then we, along with Lawrence and Vally's mom, went to the airport in Mangalore, only the airport is actually in Bajpe which is 45 minutes away from Mangalore. On the way, Uncle Lawrence pointed out the smokestacks of a new oil refinery which either had opened or is about to open in the area. There was a lot of opposition from environmentalists and there were a lot of promises from the company and no one knows how that will all turn out.