TRAVEL\INDIA\letters\india5

NAGPUR - WHERE VALLY LIVED FROM AGE 11 TO COLLEGE

It was a short flight to Bombay. Actually all of our flights were short, in the one hour range, because India isn't all that big. We flew on Indian airlines and some of the planes had no English letters on them at all, but Vally assured me that they said "Indian Airlines" in Hindi. All of the planes were jets, and for some re-organizational reason the 737s all said Alliance Airlines. We didn't think they'd let us carry a large machete onto the plane, so we checked our luggage. We wanted to go to Nagpur but there are no direct flights. It was just as well, because even though we were not looking forward to being back in Bombay, we needed to change our wardrobes. Nagpur isn't exactly in the north (actually it is in the center of the country) but the climate is definitely cooler than in Goa or Pangla and we were headed even further north where everyone told us it gets "really cold."

In Bombay we were met by Rodin and Matthew and by Dr. Bashir, a cardiology fellow who appeared to be in his late 20's. I had corresponded with an Indian physician (Dr. Lokandwallah) who had written the only paper on heart rate variability (my field) whose author had an Indian name. I thought it might be fun to give a talk on heart rate variability (HRV) in India. We corresponded back and forth by snail mail and everyone was very enthusiastic about my coming. We agreed to finalize the date when I got there, so we had called from Chrissie's when we got there. There was no wonderfully convenient time, but since we had a 5-hour layover in Bombay, we decided to shoot for that. This was, if you are trying to keep track, on December 30. As it turned out, Dr. Lokandhwallah wasn't able to be there, but he had put Dr. Bashir on the case and it was he who turned up at the airport to meet me. So, Vally went to Chrissie's to try to put together our northern wardrobe and I went off in a cab with Dr. Bashir. Vally was having an anxiety attack about my getting back to the airport in time, and gave me enough money to take the train (just in case). Dr. Bashir was amused and promised him that he would get me back in time.

I was pretty tired and had a fatigue headache, so I wasn't at my best, but Dr. Bashir happily pumped me for information about HRV. I completely ignored what was going on outside the cab window, since watching what happened wasn't going to change whether we survived the drive or not. We went to KEM Hospital, short for King Edward Memorial. We got out at the cardiology building which reminded me strongly of the Cardiology Institute in Havana-the same green walls and the same (if not stronger) smell of disinfectant. Except it was much, much more crowded. I saw a man being wheeled in on a stretcher and I asked if someone who was having a heart attack would be wheeled through the crowd in the lobby in the same way. The answer was affirmative. Dr. Bashir led me to the 7th floor, where the cardiac cath lab is, via another old-fashioned cage-door elevator. When we got there, he checked on things and said that there was a problem in the cath lab, so we would have to wait for a little while. I was ushered into the office of the chief, whose name I did not catch. I accepted the offer of a limka (carbonated lemonade in what looks like an old-fashioned Pepsi bottle) and used it to take a tylenol, hoping it would take effect before my talk. The chief was a reddish-haired woman probably in her early 40's. She was very gracious and hospitable. The problem in the cath lab was a 26 day old baby who had been brought in for treatment of aortic stenosis. Congenital aortic stenosis is a situation where the opening between the heart and the aorta is too small, and the heart cannot force enough blood through to meet its own needs and the needs of the body. The hope was to use a tiny inflatable balloon to stretch the opening and buy the baby some time. Unfortunately, the baby's heart stopped on the table. Everyone was sad about it.

I really liked the chief and asked her a lot of questions, even though with the headache everything I said felt forced. KEM is one of 4 public hospitals which serve the entire indigent population of Bombay. Each has one cardiac cath lab which can do 5-6 cases per day. We talked about how there is a lot of cardiovascular disease in India, partly because of diet and smoking and partly it may be a case of genetics. Living in Bombay is supposed to be the equivalent of smoking a pack a day, although I am not sure how that plays out from a cardiology point of view. There is no separate children's hospital, so these labs serve both adults and children. After 5 PM, they use the same lab as an electrophysiology lab and on Saturdays they put in pacemakers. I kept thinking of the Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. The chief also said that half of the equipment doesn't work at any given time and to get it fixed means going through a bureaucratic maze that can take many frustrating months. This woman gives meaning to the term dedicated. For this she makes $300 per month, as she put it, what she could make in one day in private practice. She also gets a subsidized apartment near the hospital. She isn't married. I think there are 6 attendings on staff and about 9 fellows. I asked about their level of expertise and it seemed like they are doing everything that we are doing here, like a lot of stents. I asked her if people burn out there and she readily agreed that they did. I didn't get to ask her what kind of future she envisioned for herself.

Finally it was time for my talk. We went to a room full of chairs and Dr. Bashir most skillfully managed my overheads. I think there were about 20 people there, a low turnout because a lot of people had managed to escape for the holidays. I had planned my talk for a situation where there was no way to actually obtain HRV numbers and planned to focus on how to infer HRV from information I knew they could get. I had learned my lesson in Cuba where I planned 4 talks on HRV without realizing that they did not have to equipment to record the signal upon which HRV is based. At KEM, however, they actually did have the recorders, and also a scanner to read the tapes. When I found out that they have the same scanner that we do, I arranged for them to get a free copy of the HRV software that runs on their scanner. It had come and been installed the day before. However, I had performed this miracle at 3 PM of my last day at work before leaving for India, so there was no time to change the talk. Instead I grabbed a set of xeroxes of typical examples of HRV in healthy and sick people. Luckily, they were able to make copies for everyone.

I think the talk was fine and people were able to follow me, although no one got the jokes. There was a question and answer period afterwards and I was somewhat surprised, although I should not have been, at how interested they were in the question of whether regular meditation can improve HRV. No one has even asked me that question before, in the many talks I have given. It quickly got to be time to leave and we literally rushed out the door. We got to the cab at 5:10 and told the driver we needed to be at the airport by 5:45. The driver blanched slightly, swallowed hard and then said "Okay." I didn't look out the window. Dr. Bashir and a female cardiology fellow continued to ply me with questions all the way to the airport, I felt like I was talking too much, but I was on automatic pilot and making the best of my tired state. I know I accomplished my purpose. I actually got to the airport and checked in before Vally did (after all that). Linda, Rodin and the kids came with him. He too had run out of time, and didn't start packing until 4:15. He wasn't sure what he had brought and it turned out that he had forgotten most of our underwear. Linda had talked him out of the big backpack. Vally said she was the only person in the world who could have done it.

Another short flight, meal included, as always, and as always terrible coffee (Nescafe) and tea served from a pot with tea bags hanging out of it. Matthew and a friend met us at the airport in Nagpur. That's when Matthew's rickshaw taxi fell over. We all got into a cab, Matthew and his buddy, with his arm around Matthew in front. We headed for Uncle Virgil and Auntie Ethel's house. They aren't really relatives either. In India, children call all women "auntie" and all men "uncle," at least people that they know. So these names are left over from Vally's childhood. I got the sense that Uncle Virgil and Auntie Ethel would have been just as happy if we skipped the titles, I think they made them feel old. Ethel is 58, which she told me after having me guess that she looked like she was in her early 40's. I am guessing that Virgil is slightly older. Their last name is Santos. Virgil is Nora's brother. Nora is one of the people we met at the airport in Bahrain. The Santos family and Vally's family go back to the time that Vally's mom and her then 3 children settled in Nagpur when Vally was 11. Nagpur was chosen because there was a new church-owned apartment there and Auntie Pauline (same one who avoided us in Goa) was teaching school there. Auntie Santos, Virgil's mother virtually adopted Vally's mom and her brood, literally bringing them pots and pans and an electric hot plate so they could cook. They arrived as refugees with nothing. In those days, you had to wait up to a year to get a gas connection, but Vally's dad was able, before returning to Saudi Arabia, to bribe someone and get the connection very quickly.

Uncle Virgil had had a heart attack back in the fall and his careers as a drinker and a smoker had both come to an abrupt halt. He has emphysema from the cigarettes, but he's doing pretty well. Vally borrowed every jazz CD he could from the library and taped it for Uncle Virgil who loves jazz, so in a way he was the largest beneficiary of our trip. He has a really good stereo.

The Santos' house was one of the nicest of our trip. The original house had been torn down and this one had been constructed on the same lot. Every lot has a square footage allowance, called the FSQ or something like that which sets an upper limit to the amount of indoor space that can be constructed on it. If necessary that allowance can probably be upped with a suitable bribe. The Santos house occupies most of a tiny lot on a narrow street in a densely populated area, with a tiny, maybe 5 foot deep front and back yard, and a wide path between the house and the property line fence on one side. I think the house is attached to the adjacent house on the other side. The outside of the house is lined with large plants on both sides of the path. It looks like each of the plant-choked windows of our house, except outdoors. It felt wonderful. The inside of the house is beautifully decorated with white walls. The living room has a red, white and black color scheme which works beautifully. There are two levels, the front hall, living room, dining room, kitchen (with real cabinets and counter tops, and room for a table), large master bedroom and bath downstairs and two bedrooms, a hallway and another bathroom upstairs. Probably because of the indoor space limit, half of the upstairs is an outdoor terrace that is half covered and half open. There is a potted pomegranate tree there which Ethel told us has borne full-sized fruit. We slept in the upstairs bedroom.

About 18 years ago, one of the sisters from the nearby convent came to the house and asked Virgil and Ethel to come with her, she had something to show them. "Something" was a 9 day old baby girl who had been abandoned at the convent. They fell head over heels in love with her and took her home immediately. Its not that simple anymore. Lisa graciously allowed us to use her room which had a king-sized bed and a poster of Michael Jackson on the door. We didn't see that much of Lisa because the Xmas-New Year period is traditionally one of almost continuous partying for Nagpur's Catholic teenagers. The bedroom also contained the air-cooler for the whole house, a huge device with a big fan. There was a Hindu wedding going on nearby which meant all-night music and noise. The second night was New Year's eve with a generous serving of firecrackers. I had hoped to catch up on some sleep, but it was hard to tune out all the noise. At daybreak it got worse, with vehicles and vendors shouting about things like cabbages. It was the definition of the word cacophony. We did manage a nap during the day.

We probably arrived at about 9:30 PM. We were greeted warmly and instantly made to feel totally welcome by everyone except Melody. Melody is a 4 year old white spitz. Indoor pet dogs are beginning to be seen in India, and curiously, with one exception, every indoor pet dog I saw in Nagpur was a white spitz. I started to wonder if they were all related somehow. Anyway, Melody and Ethel are a wonderful pair. Ethel makes a big fuss over Melody, who is absolutely devoted to her. After barking dutifully, Melody basically ignored us, although she reacted visibly to every move the Ethel made. I loved watching them together. Typically, for example, as Ethel set up the ironing board which folds down from the wall for us, Melody stood right on top of it and had to be carried away. from it. She has Virgil's company when Ethel is at the bank where she works, and she does allow him to take her for walks.

Thus began our stay in Nagpur, a city of about 4 million (a small town by Indian standards), famous for its tangerines. Nagpur means "land of the snakes" in Hindi. Nag=snake and pur=ville. Now you can see why so the names of so many Indian cities end in "pur." So can I.

Vally's Old Hangouts After breakfast (sweet-tasting curds and bananas and pumpkin and sunflower seeds for me, as well as chapatis, jam and coffee) we went out to see the old neighborhood and the old neighbors. First we went up the street and through an iron gate across a small paved yard, to the 2-family house where Vally lived from the time he was 11 to the time he left for college. His family lived upstairs, but since Vally knew the people who lived downstairs (the Rodrigues) and the apartments were basically identical, we visited downstairs. All of our drop-in visits in Nagpur followed a similar pattern, we came to the front door which opened onto a small living room. Almost always the people at home were women and sometimes children, and they were watching television, which they were kind enough to turn off at my request. We were always greeted with great enthusiasm, invited to come in and sit down, and offered some Xmas sweets. I had forgotten to mention them in the Goa part of this travelogue. There are certain sweets that are traditionally made for Xmas: one is like a small turnover with a coconut filling (that's what Peter's servants were making), another pretzel-shaped, another was a large thin wafer, all were made with a sweet dough and all were fried. And did I mention the fruitcake? For breakfast on Xmas day, that was all we had, just sweets and then we ate them, although not exclusively, for the rest of the day too. What a buzz! Anyway, on our first visit we had just eaten a late breakfast, and we knew we would be expected to eat lunch in less than 3 hours, so we did our best by tasting and nibbling at the sweets. The apartment was similar to the neighbor's house in Goa, masonry construction and all the rooms jumbled together and opening onto each other rather than onto hallways. Vally says that all of the rooms did have windows. Most of the rooms had beds, either mattresses on the floor or iron cots and metal cabinets in them. The kitchen, like the kitchen in Pangla, had a wooden work surface, a few open shelves and no cabinets. Except for the living room, the apartment seemed dark, but that would be an advantage in the hot weather. Half of the roof of the building was tiled but the other half was a terrace, and Vally has described to me how in the heat of the summer they would flood the terrace with water in the late part of the day and then after the water had evaporated and cooled things off, the family would go up there and sleep. The people we visited first had a Benji-type dog who seemed very friendly. I asked "Does he bite?" and they said "Yes, when people pet him he gets excited and he bites." Whoops, better not! There was a toddler there who was bored senseless and wanted to go outside and look for some action. We stayed about 1/2 hour and then went to see some sights.

The streets were, of course, crowded and everything was dusty. They are widening some of the streets and that involves laying a 2 or 3 foot wide bed of large pieces of gravel at the side of the road. They use women instead of wheelbarrows to move rocks. We saw this in Panjim also. In the road-building projects, a pile of gravel was dumped somewhere and when gravel needed to be moved from one place to another, even a few feet, it was loaded (by a man) into a large wok-like pan which the woman hoisted onto a donut of cloth on her head. She walked to where the rocks are supposed to go (the side of the road or if something is being demolished, the dump truck) dumped her load and returned. In Nagpur, it seemed like there were couples working together, and some of the women had babies and small children with them who had to just sit there, at the side of the road, while their mothers worked. I remember one baby who was about 7 months old, sitting on the ground in nothing but an undershirt, absolutely filthy, with mucus running out of his nose and a look of misery on his face.

Vally took me to see his old school, St. John's, a large red brick building, unmistakably, a school. School was out, but the building was open and the incredible thing, at least to an American, is that nothing had changed about the place, except the names of the kids who were playing cricket in the schoolyard, and their last names were probably no different either. The classrooms, the blackboards, the halls, the dark wooden table-style two-person desks, the chairs, the signs on the doors, were all the same. It was like walking back in time. We walked around the empty school, peering into the locked classrooms through the windows in the doors. The building had several floors, and we went up to the second floor office which was also wide open, but no one was there. Vally found me an unlocked bathroom which had Indian style toilets.

We left St. John's and continued the tour. Vally wanted to track down one of his old friends Joe D'Souza (no relation either). He had half an idea which narrow alleyway the house faced but wasn't sure. We went down one alleyway and luckily the people there were able to direct us. Joe's mother, a tiny, bent old lady was expecting us and she had cooked up a huge batch of Xmas sweets just for us. We couldn't!!!! We just barely managed another nibble on some sweets. Joe wasn't there, in fact it turns out he has a construction company in Goa and we were sorry that we didn't know to look for him there. His brother Basil however was still in Nagpur, although at work. and his daughter, a tall, shy 9 year old in a thin, worn-out dress was there with her grandmother. Everyone spoke some English, although the grandmother was thrilled to talk with Vally in Konkani. There are two flavors of Catholics in Nagpur, those who originated in Goa and local people who were converted. The Goans speak Konkani and English, and the locals speak Hindi and Marathi. In Nagpur, there are English schools and Hindi schools, and in each case, the other language is taught as a second language. The Goans dominate the church in Nagpur and don't socialize with the locals. The younger generation of Goans doesn't know Konkani. We escaped from there about 1/2 hour later, leaving Joe's mother very disappointed that we weren't hungry. We wanted to go back to Virgil and Ethel's place to see if Matthew had called. As we headed back, we passed a large, low white building across the street on a fenced landscaped lot. As Vally was telling me that that was "The club" where the New Year's Eve dance would be held, he was hailed by some people hanging out just outside. We crossed the street. By this time, we had evolved a strategy to deal with crossing busy streets. It was that I looked straight ahead, ignoring all of the traffic and keeping my survival instincts totally in check, while Vally led me across by the hand, and I followed without question. This was much safer and less confusing to the local drivers than my natural mode of panicking and freezing in the middle of traffic. Several old friends were at the club, some of whom had come in from the gulf and also from Australia for the holidays. We exchanged pleasantries re: family, jobs, etc. and escaped, promising to visit more that evening.

A Doctor Who Hasn't Lost His Soul We got back to the house and Matthew had called and promised to call back later. Virgil wanted us to go see Dr. Naidu. Dr. Naidu was Vally's old family doctor and is currently Virgil's doctor. When Vally was young, Dr. Naidu had just begun his practice and his office, which was in his house con further subdivided into a tiny waiting room and an equally tiny examining room. He was on call day and night, and would treat anyone who needed his help, regardless of their ability to pay. Often his patients were so uneducated that they did not have words for their symptoms and did not know their own last names. Now Dr. Naidu has a whole building which is called the Naidu Clinic. His wife practices OB/GYN there and in fact she delivered Tim and Bart and Matthew. Of course, that means she gets credit for not realizing that Vally's mom was carrying twins, and responsible for her giving birth to two babies for whom she had only one set of clothing. Now Dr. Naidu's son has gone into practice with his dad too. We walked through a waiting room filled with anxious looking people and it looked like Dr. Naidu is still treating anyone who needs a doctor. We were directed down the hall into one of the larger examining rooms which said "ELECTROCARDIOGRAMS" on the door. The interior reminded more of Cuba than of the US, but I can't give you a clear picture of what was there: I remember a wooden bookcase with medicines on the shelves, a cot, some old-looking equipment and two women who directed us to wait briefly. Dr. Naidu saw us between patients, in fact the next patients, a muslim couple (her head was covered) were coming in one door and Dr. Naidu asked them to wait for a little while. Dr. Naidu sat behind his wooden desk. I must add here, that Dr. Naidu is something of a pillar of the community, very active in community affairs, on planning boards, etc. At one time he was the deputy mayor of Nagpur. It would be an understatement to say that I was impressed by his presence. He was one of the few people I met in India whom I could describe as fully in his personal power, three-dimensional and confident. I emphasize the words three-dimensional: intellectually, emotionally, spiritually he seemed filled out. Vally tells me that he is a devout Hindu and that even in the early days he always seemed to know how to get things done. He was warm and welcoming, and not arrogant in any way. When he found out that I worked in cardiology (he specializes in cardiology now), he regretted that he hadn't known in advance so that he could have arranged for me to give a talk in Nagpur also. He showed me a brochure for an International Cardiology Conference that he was organizing in conjunction with the University of Alabama, on New Techniques and Concepts in Cardiology. It will take place in February in Nagpur. There will be 8 speakers, 7 from the US, of whom 5 had Indian names and one from India. I think it meant a lot to him that I was suitably impressed. I asked him about Vally's Aunt Lucy, his father's sister, a nun, who died suddenly, about 3 years ago, in her 40s. Vally knew that she had heart disease when she was a child and sort of assumed that she was born with it. Dr. Naidu said that she had had rheumatic fever as a small child which left her with a damaged heart valve. She had actually had valve replacement surgery about 2 years before she died, and her death was unexpected. The more I think about Dr. Naidu, the more I realize that I was privileged to meet a unique person. My sense of him is that he could have come to the US at any time, gone into practice here and made a lot of money, but would have meant giving up his soul. We spent about 10 minutes with Dr. Naidu, then he had to get back to work.

As we headed back with Virgil, we ran into the first of two Annies. We met meet the second one the next day. Virgil went back to the house, and we stayed on to visit. Annie #1 was a pre-school teacher in her late 50's and had her own nursery school. We visited her at the school which consisted of a fenced yard and a few small rooms with kid-sized benches and table. There children weren't there at the time. I was floored when she said she had about 90 children in her school. Five adults, including Annie, supervise the children. Matthew used to go to her school when he was a pre-schooler. Kid start regular school at 4 in Nagpur. Annie wanted to tell us her story, and we got the sense that she tells this story over and over again to anyone who will listen. When she was young, she received a proposal of marriage. She turned it down because she had to stay home and take care of her parents, which she did. The man never married and worked in Madras. Eventually her parents died and she contacted the man. In her words "I decided to give it a try." He had never forgotten her either. Finally, when she was 54 they did marry and she gave up her school, moved to Madras, and they were very happy. He had quietly become an alcoholic, according to her, because that was how he and his co-workers socialized. When they got married she asked him to quit drinking, and he did. Three years later, which was 3 years ago, her strong, active husband suddenly died of a heart attack. She is still devastated and somewhere she read that if people are used to drinking heavily they shouldn't stop suddenly. Although this warning applies to a detox situation, she now wonders if she caused his death by asking him to quit drinking. Vally found her greatly changed. We left Annie's, and went back to the house for lunch. This was New Year's Eve and if we wanted to be conscious at midnight we had to have some rest.

Vally got up before I did and went out to get his beard trimmed. It had been over 2 weeks and we didn't bring a clipper, although the converter worked fine (until it blew up in Agra) to keep Vally's electric toothbrush and the batteries for my lap top charged. Here's what happened when Vally went to get his beard trimmed. Auntie Ethel told Vally where the barber who used to be at the Hotel which is about a block away had moved to and he went there. It was a 2 chair operation. Vally asked the barber to trim his beard and first the barber stepped back and analyzed his head. He asked Vally if he wanted a haircut too, but he said "No." The barber trimmed Vally's beard carefully, seemingly one hair at a time, stepping back after every cut to analyze his work, making sure that each hair was exactly the way he wanted it. It took 1/2 hour. After the barber was satisfied with the beard, he sprayed Vally's face with some liquid and gave him a facial massage. Then, he asked Vally if he wanted his face powdered and scented. Vally didn't want that either. The cost for this whole treatment was 7 Rs him 50. The beard looked good too. Vally also visited with Kavita's mother. By the time he got back, I was awake and talking with Auntie Ethel. It was cardiology and general health consult time again. Basil, whose mother and daughter we had visited earlier came by and he and Vally caught up on things.

Kavita's Mother

Vally promised Kavita's mother that he would bring me to visit. So after dinner we went there with Matthew, who, by the way was staying with the friend who had come to the airport with him. This might be a good point to tell the story of Kavita's arrival in the family. Bart and Kavita knew each other from college in Nagpur. He had liked to hang out with her, but was too shy to make his intentions clear. One day she confronted him and said "I see you wanting to hang out with me and I'm beginning to like you too, but if this isn't going anywhere I want to stop this now." Bart replied "Gee, I didn't think I was good enough to be liked by anybody." They took it from there. But there was a problem. Kavita's mother, who was widowed, had remarried and the man she chose to marry, while financially well off, was also considerably older than she and was a never-married alcoholic who used to make a total fool of himself while drunk. Actually, he quit drinking after they got married, but the match was considered scandalous and Kavita's family's social standing plummeted. Vally's parents still lived in Nagpur at the time. They've only been in Goa since last March. When Bart and Kavita set their wedding date, Vally's father went ballistic and refused to attend the wedding because he did not approve of Kavita's family. Moreover, he ordered everyone else in the family to boycott the wedding. Bart got a lot of support from Vally, who came to India for the wedding but not from his twin who perhaps was also influenced by not wanting to give up his best friend in the whole world. In the end he relented and attended the wedding, but by then several people were unable to change their plans and come after all. The fact that Kavita is less restrained in her behavior than the other women in the family may have contributed to the situation. Kavita's mother having heard that Vally had had certain spiritual experiences had written a letter to him enthusiastically sharing her newfound spirituality which she had gotten through involvement with the Catholic charismatic movement.

So, at about 9 PM, with Matthew in tow, we went to see Kavita's mother. Kavita had just spent 3 months in Nagpur helping her mother who is taking care of both of her aging parents at home. Kavita's grandmother has been bedridden and miserable for years, and her grandfather, a few days before had fallen and broken his hip. Kavita's mother had the help of her husband and her teen-aged son, but the whole thing seemed totally overwhelming to me. There was not a trace of self-pity in anything she told us. What totally blew my mind about Kavita's mother was that I have before never met anyone who had cloned themselves, and that's what Kavita's mother did when she had her daughter. Clearly, they were 26 years apart in age, but in their looks, their mannerisms, their facial expressions, they were exactly the same. Only their "energy" was different. Kavita's mother had a lighter, clearer more serene energy. Still, I kept transferring my feelings about and experiences with Kavita onto this new person and then realizing, over and over again, this is not Kavita. I would love to have been able to spend more time with her (her name is Sheila) but, as always, we had to go.

We went back to the house, took showers, ironed our clothes (after we got Melody off the ironing board) and got ready to go to the dance.

New Year's Eve Dance

We left for the club with Matthew at about 10:45 PM. Virgil and Ethel had decided to skip the dance, they had been to enough of these things. One of the traditional New Year's eve activities in Nagpur is to have a fire. Unfortunately, there isn't that much that burns cleanly in Nagpur and common fuel is old rickshaw taxi tires. Probably every 50 feet, someone was burning some tires. The smell was absolutely awful. Also, I wanted to call the US for New Years. Making a long distance call is expensive but otherwise not difficult in India. You go to a special manned phone booth. To make an international call the booth has to say ISD. You go in and dial and the attendant starts a meter. When the call is over, you can make another call. When you are done, he calculates the cost and you pay it. There is a 25% discount between 10:45 and 11:30 PM which was nice. Even so, 2 ten-minute calls cost over $35. Admission to the dance was 100 Rs plus 20 Rs for our own table. We crossed a good-sized wooden dance floor, with a stage up front. The stage was brightly lit and the band looked exactly like any dance band you might see in the US. They played the same electrified music too. No one was on the dance floor, despite the valiant efforts of the band leader to convince people to dance. Since this whole thing is kind of a ritual, maybe he knew better than to expect people to be dancing this early in the game. Beyond the dance floor was a dirt-floored area, with a canvas roof, at least twice as big as the dance floor, filled with rectangular wooden folding tables, and metal folding chairs-no different from those already seen, except there were no tablecloths. It was still early and was only half-filled, although that surprised me and I wondered if this party was going to be a bit of a bust. Each table had a number, although the system was arcane and it took several minutes to find our table. We had timed our trip to be in Nagpur for the dance, because we knew it would maximize the number of old friends that Vally could see and I could meet. Not surprisingly, every few feet Vally recognized someone. It was fun to watch, because I could always tell if that person recognized Vally. Sometimes, Vally would wait a decent amount of time and then say who he was, other times I could see recognition dawn. Always, there was a wonderful outpouring of delight, and a hug, and then I'd be introduced, and I'd add one more soul to my blur. Only one person still didn't connect after Vally said his name, and we didn't embarrass him by telling him that we knew he was faking it. One of the people I did meet Valerie, Vally's high school sweetheart who is now a physician, has two children. I also met her sister, Jovena, who seemed a lot friendlier. Another person I remember was a man named Ubie who makes his living doing something involving art. He literally clung to Vally when they hugged hello. He said that his wife and daughter were in Chicago. He certainly seemed lonely.

Midnight I loved the way the New Year was celebrated in Nagpur. As midnight approached, a line formed of people holding hands and walking around the perimeter of the area with the tables. They he back. We followed to a large yard. In the middle of the yard, there was a kind of scarecrow, a stuffed figure of a man wearing an old suit, held up by a stick so that there was room under him for a carefully arranged unlit bonfire. At the stroke of midnight (although the band's version of midnight and the bells of the church next door's version of when that was differed somewhat), the bon fire was lit, and the "old man" who symbolized the old year was quickly consumed as we all sang "Aulde Lang Syne," the fireworks buried in the bonfire exploded, the church bells peeled and people hugged and kissed and wished each other "Happy New Year." It was better than any multi-media techno show could possibly have been. We greeted more people outside, then wandered back in. The dance floor was finally full and I danced with Ubie for awhile. They were selling samosas and drinks but we didn't have any. Most of the people had brought alcohol and were working on their buzzes. There were small children asleep on the tables. We had decided not to stay late, so when we ran out of people to greet, we edged out the door. Lisa and her friends had just arrived and were on the dance floor when we left. Matthew left with us, and as we walked out the back way, I realized that midnight mass had just ended. It seemed kind of strange, in a way that the mass was in direct competition with the bonfire, yet both were Catholic functions. That's when we ran into Sister Janet, Matthew's friend. According to Matthew she is in the Saint Vincent De Paul Order which sells religious books. She was wearing a saffron sari, as do most Indian nuns, when we met her. She has a lot of freedom and among other things says Matthew, she climbs trees for fun and drives a truck, most unusual for a woman in India, as part of her job. One more thing I realized at the dance was that there was an enormous difference between those people we met who had stayed in Nagpur, and those who were working abroad. The difference was about confidence and vitality. I mentioned this to Vally and he said, "Nagpur is just a small town where nothing ever changes, and those who stay behind are not interested in expanding their horizons." We got to bed at 1:30 AM and tried to sleep through the fireworks which continued all night.

Second Day in Nagpur By the time we got up, ate breakfast, and repacked our bags so that Lisa' room no longer looked like it had been hit by a tornado, it was late morning. Vally was really aware that we were running out of time in Nagpur and there were still people and places he wanted to see. He had promised Valerie and Jovena that he we would stop in so we went there first. It looked like no one was home, because the gate was locked so we went looking for Annie #2 to whom we had waved the day before. When Vally was a child there was an old spinster, Mary D'Souza (still no relation) who lived next door and had adopted several children. Vally's family would go and visit Mary D'Souza at feast times. Annie was one of those children, and even though the children were not allowed to go out and play, they sort of became friends with Vally and his gang. There was a Hindu man up the road with whom Annie fell in love. Mary D'Souza did not want her to have anything to do with him. Annie poured kerosene on herself and threatened to light it, a drama that was witnessed by Vally's family from their the second floor apartment next door. Eventually she did marry him and had 2 daughters, Dimple and Sweetie and a son Rakesh. Her husband began drinking and quickly turned into a loser, so she left him and came back home with the kids. He finally died but Mary D'Souza is still around, although we didn't go to her room to see her because she is now senile. Annie is the principal of a school and also the honorary magistrate. This is a very powerful position because she can sign important papers like passport documents, and she can perform marriages. The normal term is 3 years, but Annie has been doing this for 6 because she has a reputation for being totally honest, a rarity, as you now know, in India. We got the usual greeting and were force fed some more sweets. Annie regarded me with great curiosity, and seemed delighted that we could comfortably relate to each other. Dimple is engaged to be married and proudly showed us pictures of her engagement party and of her fiance. I asked her how it happened. She said that she was at college one day and a fellow student whom she had seen before but never thought much about approached her and said "I've been watching you and I want to marry you." Her response was "I don't know about such things, so you'd better talk to my mom about it." He did and they got engaged. The marriage will be in May. Sweetie wants to come to the US. I think she was disappointed when we told her that the only way she could come would be as a graduate student, that a job was out of the question unless she could do something that no one from the US was capable of. There were also two instructors from the local college in attendance, physics and math. They seemed pretty shy and didn't say much. The Chai Shop and the Market When we left Annie's, we decided to go to the market area. First Vally wanted to show me the chai shop where he used to go for tea. It was actually an Udipi restaurant, a high-ceilinged, dingy place, with a lot of old formica topped tables. It hadn't changed much either. We speculated about whether it had been painted since Vally had last been there. The one noticeable change was a new refrigerator which had been placed right near the cash register. Refrigerators are not original equipment in many Indian homes and restaurants, and I guess there is no place in the kitchen for them, so they wind up in really odd places, like the altar room at Pangla. For 3 Rs each we ordered chai and asked that it be made with milk only. It was very good. The only problem we had was that the smallest thing we had was a 100 Rs note, and the cashier was really put off by having to make change. If was as if we were paying for 2 cups of coffee with $100 bill. Even though carrying our money in 100 Rs notes already represented quite a wad, we realized we needed to get some smaller bills.

We left and walked to the market, which was circular and at least several blocks in size. It is called gole bazaar (which means round market). There were nanny goats and kids wandering around everywhere. I picked up one very young kid and cuddled it. It reminded me of when I had goats in Virginia and how much I enjoyed cuddling the babies. I never figured out who its mother was and it didn't seem that concerned about her, which was odd, and I felt a little uneasy when I put it down. There were vendors everywhere, mostly produce but also street food. The carrots here are amazing, because they are so red-in fact the word orange would not apply. I never sampled one to see if they tasted any different. As we walked along, we saw a chicken vendor. There were a bunch of surprisingly small chickens, some with many feathers missing, crammed into a small cage. They looked like fluffy but scraggly white pigeons with long legs. Just as I was trying to focus my eyes on this scene, I heard the sound that a chicken makes when it is in utter despair. I saw that the source of this sound had its head on the block, literally. I managed to turn away in time to avoid seeing the coup de grace, but Vally happened to be looking a moment later and didn't. At that point I began to think that I really didn't want to stay in the market anymore but Vally wanted me to see the place where they sold meat. We got there and there were baby goats (male) tied up outside and inside too, and I truly didn't want to see any more, so we left.

We took a bicycle rick all the way back to Virgil and Ethel's house. The driver wanted 7 Rs but Vally gave him 10 which made him very happy. Although all of the rickshaws in Bombay and Cochin and Goa were motor-powered, in Nagpur and everywhere we went in the north, there were also cheaper human-powered bicycle rickshaws. Part of the trip back was uphill, so Vally kind of walked along and helped push for part of it and the driver also had to get off to push. On the level parts, we all rode. Although there was nothing comfortable about the seat, I found riding in the rick much less frightening than walking.

Valerie's House After we got back from the market, we tried Valerie's house again, and this time I noticed that there was another open gate at the other end of the front porch (total porch, concrete maybe 4 by 12 at street level) and we went in and knocked. Valerie's mother and her 3(!) white spitzes greeted us. We sat down in the small entrance sitting room, tried unsuccessfully to refuse the Xmas sweets, and listened to Valerie's mother chatter away. Matthew found us there. After awhile Valerie and Jovena came down to join us, still in their nightgowns. They had pretty much stayed up all night. I got to talk with Jovena a little bit. She is most unusual by Nagpur standards because she is in her mid-30's and not in the least bit desperate to get married. On the other hand, she doesn't live in Nagpur, but rather in Bahrain where she earns a good living. I asked her if there was much social life for single people there, and she immediately assured me that there was a very big singles scene there. I didn't get much of a chance to talk with Valerie, and I would like to have as she seemed reasonably friendly. Vally told me that in India, physicians, like Valerie, have one year of college, then they go to medical school for 4 years and graduate with an MBBS degree, which translates a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. Then they can go into practice. The M.D. degree is awarded only after advanced training. Valerie, as far as Vally knows, is not an M.D., and Dr. Naidu wasn't when he started his practice, although he is now.

Talking With Matthew By now time was really getting short. We needed to leave for the airport by 7:00 to catch an 8:30 flight, and it was after 5. Matthew wanted to get together with us. We met at another coffee shop. This time, even though I wasn't hungry, I had kulfi ice cream, hoping that it would be as good as the ice cream in Cochin. It was okay but that ice cream in Cochin remained a high point of the trip. Matthew told us about a 7-day retreat that he had gone to in which he began to deal with some of the painful incidents from his childhood and how that had opened him up to knowing that he has to deal with these things. This was in sharp contrast to a conversation I had with Zena, where it became clear to me that Zena did not see any connection between people's pain and their behavior. If they get angry a lot, in her model of the world, "Its because of their nature." We also had an interesting conversation, which might have been the day before, in which Matthew said that "In general, either people are scared of you or you are scared of them, that's how life is." Vally tried to show him that there is a third, more loving way to be with people. We finally gave him a way to think about this when we suggested he ask himself "How would Uncle Albert deal with this?" Uncle Albert, whom you will meet next letter from now, is the Bishop of Lucknow and is Matthew's role model of a loving person. Matthew has read about half of "Healing Your Aloneness". We came out it feeling like we had connected with Matthew on a very deep level, and frustrated that we had to end it so quickly. We knew we were too far away to really help, but urged him to write. Leaving for Delhi

We hurried back to Virgil and Ethel's to spend a little more time with them. A few priests, some of whom had known Vally, wandered in for visits. Finally the cab came, and we headed for Delhi.