TRAVEL\INDIA\letters\india6

LUCKNOW AND BISHOP ALBERT

The flight was notable for one thing: the worst in-flight vegetarian meal we have ever had. Here's what it consisted of: cheese kabobs-bits of paneer (white Indian cheese) and green peppers on toothpick (that was the best part) and then a tough pastry shell with a chewy white cheese filling, then a cheese sandwich-white bread with the crusts cut off and sour white cheese inside (I looked around and no one had eaten that) and a bad Indian candy bar. It was truly an amazing meal!

Our flight arrived in Delhi at about the same time as another flight, and even though the airport is very modern-looking, there was almost an hour's wait for our baggage. We had already seen the smoky Delhi air from the windows of the plane and we were dreading leaving the airport. This was the first time we had seen a substantial number of Europeans and Americans in quite awhile. We got a pre-paid taxi slip to go to the guest house at JNU, short for Jawaharlal Nehru University. We had to spend the night in Delhi to catch a flight to Lucknow in the morning. The guest house stay was arranged by Sudha, an Indian chemistry post-doc at the University of Missouri, St. Louis (where Vally teaches). Sudha is on the faculty at JNU. It cost $8 per night to stay there, and it was near the airport. Getting out of the airport building was amazingly difficult, because there was only one side of one door open and two plane loads of people and baggage carts were trying to get through it. On the other side there was only a narrow passageway through a huge crowd of relatives and friends and people holding signs with the names of the passengers they were supposed to pick up. The taxis (elderly Ambassadors) were just past the mob, but it took awhile to find a driver who was willing to take us, since most of the passengers were going much further and were therefore a better deal. Finally we found one, a really sullen man who insisted on taking "his man" with him in the front seat. Vally succumbed to a moment of paranoia when he imagined that the two of them were planning to gang up on us. I reasoned that the taxi was pre-pay so they had our name and knew where we were going and with whom. Actually they had our name spelled,"DISUJA," but that was a detail. The air was truly smoky and foul in Delhi. The campus was about 10 minutes away and seemed in the dark to be park-like. There were students walking around, wrapped up in shawls against the cold. It was probably 50 degrees and we had kept some extra clothing in our carry on baggage. The driver, it turned out, didn't know where the guest house was and the gatekeeper's instructions were not clear, so there were a few anxious moments as we drove around in the dark looking for it.

The Aravli Guest House Finally I spotted a sign "Aravli Guest House" with an arrow and we found it-although it looked more like a large brick classroom building that than a guest house. The security guard in the lobby was extremely friendly and gracious, and he could not believe that Vally lived in the US because his Hindi was so good. Where you are from is a big issue in guest houses and hotels, because if you are a foreigner they had to have a record of your passport number and visa number. I faked it on my visa number and no one noticed. Sometimes Vally volunteered his American passport, other times they didn't ask and he didn't tell. We were escorted to room #24 on the second floor. The room was huge, probably 18' X 18', with the usual two-twin-beds-pushed-together=a-king-sized-bed. The ceiling was at least 12 feet. The room was a marvelous combination of absolutely shabby and perfectly okay. It was clean. The bed was fine. The toilet (a stand-on but with a seat) worked, even though it leaked and there was toilet paper. The hot water, which came from a "geezer" worked fine once it heated up. There was a gigantic combination heating and cooling unit which must have been at least 25 years old, and it worked if you could stand the noise. Luckily we didn't need to use it. There were towels and a drinking glass, although the rim of the glass was curved and dangerously sharp. We got bottled water from the security guard. The curtains worked and there was blue wall-to-wall carpeting, which was totally worn out, but curiously the most threadbare parts were near the walls. There were big built-in closets and it was clear that people often stayed here for longer periods. To Lucknow Even though by the time we got to sleep it was too late to get enough sleep, we slept pretty well. Vally got up ahead of me to shower and get ready and to check on a cab back to the airport. At 8 AM there was a knock on the door and a man stood there with a huge aluminum tea pot and a tray full of cups. The chai he brought us was really good. Our cab came right on time, and even though we could have gotten a cheap breakfast at the guest house, we opted for an unhurried trip to the airport. We needn't have rushed. The flight, scheduled for 9:30, was listed as "delayed." After we checked in we headed for the restaurant, which was large, bright and modern, with big white formica tables. Prices were 3 times those outside, but still very reasonable by American standards. We took a circular table near a window, ordered some food and I worked on these letters. An hour later, my computer battery had died which was very frustrating. Finally, the flight was called, and we left for Lucknow, 1 1/2 hours late. We hoped that Vally's Aunt Eugene, whom we knew was going to come to the airport to meet us, had called before she left. Aunt Eugene Seeing Eugene was one of the most important parts of this trip for Vally. Eugene, who is a Holy Cross sister, is only 3 years older than Vally. She is his father's sister and they grew up together at Kattingere. Eugene always loved playing with Vally and Andrew and later Chrissie. She hated school and she was always inventing excuses to stay home and play with her cousins. She tried the stomach ache ploy many times, but people soon caught onto her miraculous recoveries. Then she tried the head lice ploy. She'd scratch her head frantically. That worked until her mother cut off all of her hair. Vally and Eugene are very, very close. They were a team and covered for each other. For examples study, which was forbidden and going through his things, which were interesting. One day Eugene accidently spilled his ink. She panicked but Vally had the presence of mind to find an eyedropper and suck it back up. Once when Vally was about 5, he cut his finger and it was bleeding all over the place. He was afraid he would be punished so he ran away, up to the top of the hill behind the house. Eugene found him there, huddled up and terrified and she stopped the bleeding. She also never told. Ironically, Eugene became a school teacher and is now the principal of a school.

When we got into the terminal in Lucknow, we were astounded to see Eugene inside the terminal. That was the only time anyone has met us anywhere but outside. She was accompanied by two local priests, Frs. Donnie and Sylvester and one of them knew the chief of security. I had seen pictures of Eugene, but she, more than any one else, looked different from her pictures. She had gained some weight and she seemed unhealthy, as if something were sapping her vitality. Eventually, after spending several days with her, I decided that although she IS suffering from burnout, something else is going on and I was pretty sure she is very anemic. I discussed it with her, and she agreed to take vitamins and iron to see if it would help. Getting her to see a doctor, I knew, would take feeling a lot worse than she did. Eugene was delighted to see Vally.

Arrival in Lucknow After we got our bags, which took very little time since the airport had no other traffic, we all piled into the Bishop's car, a large comfortable Tata Sumo, a 4-wheel drive utility vehicle type car. We hoped to go straight to the bishop's house, but Father Donnie had other plans. He was determined to take us all to lunch. I groaned, audibly since I had already eaten two meals in the past 3 hours, but Vally decided not to fight it. We wound up at a Chinese restaurant, run by Indians. The food which I found room to sample, was pretty good, although it bore no resemblance to Chinese food in the US, in China (says Vally) or to the Chinese dishes we have had when Vally's Chinese graduate students throw a feast. Incredibly, they actually had chopsticks, so we taught the good Fathers to use them. Father's Donnie and Sylvester were in their 30's and all I remember about Father Donnie is that he spent some time in Rome. Father Sylvester had nothing to say and Vally was more interested in what Eugene had to say that what anyone else had to say. As we were finishing lunch, Eugene was starting to worry about the fact that Bishop Albert (her brother) had no way to know where we were. She and Vally headed out to find a phone booth. As they got to the door, someone from the next table ran after them and offered them his cellular phone. Seems like he was the local cellular rep, and he was a little disappointed to find out we weren't potential customers since we weren't exactly from those parts. Eugene called Uncle Albert but either she was totally intimidated by the very compact cell phone, or the connection was very bad, or both, so the very little information was actually communicated and we left hoping but not sure that Uncle Albert was no longer totally in the dark. Father Donnie gave us the tour of his school. He was the principal of a high school, out of session and unheated (always). We froze politely in the outdoors-facing hallway outside his office (he did have a good bathroom) and met another Father who taught in the school and who was ill, and looked it, wrapped up shivering in his shawl.

The Bishop's House The Bishop's house was about 20 minutes drive away. Lucknow is the capital of the state of Uttar Pradesh (called UP) and in the past was ruled by Muslim nawabs. As we drove, Vally asked me if I had a sense of the difference between the north and the south, but I could not sort out my impressions. We did see horses, ponies actually, pulling carts here and people using bicycles for serious cargo hauling. It was certainly colder but not cold by mid-western standards. Otherwise it was just as crowded, and dirty and maybe a bit more frenetic.

We got to the Bishop's house around tea time. Uncle Albert had been waiting for us this whole time, but, as usual he was also playing host, at that moment to a collection of nuns from a convent in his diocese. So we came in and had tea (and fruitcake) with the nuns. Uncle Albert was not going to be free until after dinner, so he asked Eugene to show us our rooms and generally take care of us until dinner.

Our room was upstairs, as was Eugene's. The Bishop's house was, of course, a masonry structure and very confusing because downstairs the rooms opened onto each other. In addition there was a curtain in each doorway, so you could never see past the room you were in. I got good at finding the dining room, which had a table that could seat 10 very comfortably. Uncle Albert's office which had a sitting area with sofas and coffee tables as well as a study area with a desk was off the dining room. I think his bedroom was somewhere beyond that. Father Martis, who was the diocesan administrator had another office in the opposite direction off a waiting room that adjoined the dining room. I kept wandering in there by accident, but he was never there when I did. There was a third door out of the windowless dining room which went to the kitchen and to the back door which led to a large courtyard where the Sumo was parked, and there was a long low building that was attached to the bishop's house, and a garden. There were two masonry staircases to the upstairs, one near Father Martis' office and the other one on the opposite side of the building. We found our way around the house by trial and error the whole time we were there. Upstairs the hallway, which ringed the building, faced the outdoors on one side over a masonry half wall, faced and the doors to several rooms, including the Bishop's private chapel on the other. Our room was high- ceilinged and good-sized and had its own bathroom (English) and no window. I was dumbfounded when I realized that the plumbing was set up so that the "geezer" only heated the water to the bucket-filling faucet below but not the shower. The room also had a large wooden closet, a wooden clothes drying rack, and a small table near the door, which contained a thermos full of warm drinking water (got used to it-supposed to keep you from feeling as cold). There was an overhead fan and the usual bank of switches. The door itself was two doors, a screen door and a shutter door. Although we were there in winter when temperatures could get at low as 40 degrees, summer in Lucknow features temperatures in the 100's. There were two beds in the room, and the first thing we did was push them together. These beds came complete with mosquito netting. I always wondered how that worked. A first glance they looked like wooden double-decker beds, but the upper frame is not another bed, it is the frame for the mosquito net. This frame is supported by wide boards with nicely curved decorative profiles at the head and foot of the bed. The netting itself is crumpled up over a horizontal rail parallel to the long end of the frame. Our bed in Pangla had just the head and foot parts, I don't know where the rest had gone. We didn't need the netting, because we had bought an evaporative mosquito killer in Nagpur and brought it with us, but I got Vally to demonstrate it for me. There were several narrow blankets on each bed and a crucifix on the wall, as there was in every room. When we unpacked, we called Eugene into the room to see what we had brought her. While shopping at Sam's Club we had seen a gag gift, a realistically shaped chocolate "cow pie." From what I had heard of Eugene, I thought it would be perfect. It was. Also the box had a lot of cute puns on it about "chips" and "udderly" and things like that. Later we would see Eugene read the jokes on the outside of the box to the other sisters in her convent. We also brought a large assortment of pieces of different kinds of candy (Sam's Club again) for Eugene to give to the children in her school, but to our amazement, she decided to keep it all for her own "inner" child. Later she did share it, but I know it gave her enormous pleasure to have all of those pieces of candy for herself. Each time we saw her she reported the results of having tried a different one. She loved the Little Dots because each color had a different flavor. For Uncle Albert we brought one of those tear off calendars with a different saying from Pope John Paul VI for each day. When we gave it to him, it was January 3rd and I offered to tear off the first two days so it would be current. To my surprise he said no, he would not tear any of the pages off and at the end of the year he would put it into his library.

Walking Around Uncle Albert had suggested that we go house is in a very large walled compound with a wrought iron gate and a gatekeeper, although the place, including the house, is open 24 hours a day. There is also another building where priests and seminarians (pre-priests) live. The cathedral, as well as a Catholic school are also inside the compound. The cathedral is very modern and was dedicated in 1977. Bishop Albert who is 50 years old was ordained in 1993. The cathedral has a soaring marble, sculpture-like front with a huge marble crucifix near the top. The inside was very modern too, and all I remember about it was that the figure of Christ at the front of the cathedral was the epitome of suffering. We (Eugene included) sat for a little while to get a sense of the place, then wandered out. Outside, there were some brightly-colored Xmas panoramas in the archways of the exterior hallway of the school. They had elaborately painted background murals and foreground figures. Each had a topic like "The Creation," "The Fall of Man," "The Annunciation" in huge black letters across the top. The next day they were taken down because school was about to start again. Compared to the bustling commercial street just inside, it was peaceful inside the compound.

We decided to walk outside. Eugene wanted to show Vally the place where he and his family had stayed when everyone came for Uncle Albert's ordination. It was about 2 blocks away, and they managed to get me across the streets. It used to be a convent but it is being turned into a retirement home for aging priests. It was one of those places where the paint is crumbling off the walls. I remember it as very dark. Right now there is one priest there, being taken care of by a nun. He is in his late 50's but has had a stroke. We later learned that he ignored the warning signs of an impending medical crisis, I think it was hypertension and diabetes, and now it was too late. He was propped up in a chair watching television and seemed glad to see us, but couldn't communicate very well. There was also a servant there, cleaning the kitchen and her little girl standing there staring at us. I remember seeing the chapel. The air in the place was very strange and I started to feel like I couldn't breathe, so I was glad when we got out of there. I kept wondering if Vally would have trouble breathing in there too, but I think he was still on the oral medications, so it didn't faze him.

The retirement home for diocesan priest was one of Bishop Albert's first priorities after his ordination. Uncle Albert was supposed to be at Bart and Kavita's wedding, but the day he was supposed to leave the Mother Superior of the order which he hoped would run the home was due to visit Lucknow. Her visit was so important to him that he did not go to the wedding. Initially she had refused his request saying that the order was already overcommitted. Uncle Albert pulled out all the stops and by the next morning she had changed her mind. I think the diocese already had the building. He emphasized to us, later, that although retired sisters are taken care of by other members of their order, retired elderly priests have absolutely no one to take care of them.

After we left the retirement home, we went to the market area. It was even more crowded than any I had been to before. There were sidewalks, but with the shops on one side and the sidewalk vendors on the other, there wasn't much room. We were looking for a book shop because Father Donnie had mentioned a book by Osho (Sri Rajneesh) about the Sermon on the Mount that sounded interesting to Vally. Osho is surprisingly well known here and Uncle Albert later told us he had gone to one of his day long seminars but been put off by the lack of any moral distinctions in his philosophy. For those of you who don't remember who Rajneesh is, he was the Indian guru that founded an ashram in Antelope, Oregon but finally got run out of town, and out of the country for tax evasion. You may remember the 35 Rolls Royces He has died now, but his followers still have a large ashram at Puna in India and are very much into Tantra which is kind of yoga that involves sex as a spiritual practice. We finally found a small bookstore. It was the sort of place that probably had almost everything, somewhere. Customers and books were squeezed in together, and falling all over each other. Although they didn't have the Osho book we were looking for, they had several others that we weren't looking for. Vally found a Hindi dictionary and I found a copy of Dean Ornish's book on preventing heart disease that I wanted to send to Auntie Ethel, both because she is interested and because I want to tell her that what she thinks is low fat, heart-healthy cooking isn't. On our way back, we stopped at a shop that was selling a dish (name unknown) that absolutely intrigued Eugene. A basket was made out of a bunch of noodles that was shaped and fried, and then a mixture of garbanzo beans, yogurt, potatoes and spices was ladled into it. You ate the whole thing, of course. Vally asked for one, and the proprietor would not let him pay for it until he had eaten it. He served it on a plate, handed him a couple of spoons, and we stood out in the middle of the busy sidewalk eating. I tasted it, but didn't want to risk eating huge quantities. Eugene was in heaven! Both of them thought it was very good, and when I suggested that Vally compliment the proprietor, Eugene said "Yes, do it. I want to watch his reaction. They never get compliments." So Vally did, and, as predicted, the proprietor was surprised and delighted.

Dinner Dinner at the Bishop's house is at 8 PM. At almost every meal there were some extra people, usually Father Martis and often a young seminarian who was one month from his ordination. I am not that good at remembering people I've just met casually so sometimes I wasn't sure if it was the same extra person or a different one. The cook was named Albert and his cooking was simple but very good. He also served all the meals. We started with soup-a fairly plain broth with a few vegetables. In Goa, Vally's mother had offered us soup every day, and sometimes I had accepted her offer, but it wasn't a very interesting or satisfying thing to eat. Here, however, in the 65 degree indoor chill, the same dish was very welcome. We think of dal (lentil soup) as soup, but, as I have already mentioned, in India it is a sauce to be eaten with rice or chapatis. I think we always had chapatis and rice, in addition to the vegetables and fish, but Uncle Albert was always served white toast. Only in retrospect do I realize how unusual that was, since bread is rarely seen in India. We always had fresh fruit for dessert, and fruitcake (!) The rice we had in India was just like the regular old white rice you get here, although actually at home we eat Basmati rice, which we did not see in India. In Pangla, they have another rice called "boiled rice" which is rice that was boiled and dried before it was hulled. The grains of boiled rice, once cooked again, are twice the size of regular rice, and the texture is, of course, much softer.

Uncle Albert

This was my first chance to really study Uncle Albert in detail. Vally is built like Uncle Lawrence, 5'7", 140 lbs with the relatively small bone structure that is typical of South Indians. Uncles Albert, like Andrew and to a lesser degree like Vally's dad, has a much bigger build, and is at least 5'10" and probably 180 lbs. He has, as do his brothers, a very strong, square jaw with a prominent chin. It is the first thing you notice about his face, and I kept having the sense, with all of them, that if that jaw could only relax, they could too. Uncle Albert is a good looking man, with a long straight nose and slightly narrow very intelligent eyes. I realized that he, and the other priests, all dressed in a dark blazer, grey sweater vest, and white shirt, although he put on a white cassock when he went out. My first impression, which remained with me to some degree, was that he s position. He couldn't ever just relax and be a person, he always had to be "The Bishop" and live in a world where people referred to him as "My Lord." He was very kind and even-tempered but there was no playfulness or sense of humor about him. He also had a very spiritual, otherworldly dimension. Vally said that even as a boy, he was not playful, suffered from intense headaches and stayed by himself a lot. Later, after I got home, I realized that he fit almost perfectly into a type of person called a 5 in the Enneagram. For those of you who have never heard of it, the Enneagram is a system of 9 personality types, each with its own characteristics. We had read an excellent book called "Discovering the Enneagram" by Rohr and Ebert and that is how we had become familiar with the system. Fives are very intellectual, very good at data gathering, very, very good at meditation and prayer but very bad at emotional intimacy. I think being a Bishop is very hard for a 5, and Uncle Albert freely shared how unsuited he still feels for his job. We had some long conversations about what is involved, but I will save that for later.

Attack by the Dacoit The first night at dinner, we talked about the distressing news that had come from his brother Bishop Alphonsus, the Bishop of Raiganj. Alphonsus is 63, younger than Vally's father who is the eldest son. Raiganj is a very remote place. When we looked on the map of India that is on the wall in Uncle Albert's office, I could see that Raiganj was west of us, almost in Nepal. It is a 4 hour journey by car from the nearest town, so remote that foreigners need a special permit to visit. Uncle Alphonsus had been attacked by the dacoit. The dacoit are gangs of bandits who terrorize rural areas. The story as we got was that the dacoit came in the middle of the night. They first captured the watchman and, holding him at gunpoint, demanded to be taken to the Bishop's room. The watchman tried to divert them to the room of one of the priests, but the dacoit knew that the Bishop's room was on the second floor and so the watchman had no choice but to tell them where it was. At that point they bound and gagged him. When the Bishop awoke, there was a gun pointed at his head and the dacoit said something about a bomb also. He remained very calm, and one of his thoughts was that if he were killed right then, it would be okay, he'd be satisfied with his life. The dacoit demanded all of his jewelry and all of the chalices and other golden ritual objects. Although the Bishop tried to explain that these objects where not made of solid gold, the dacoit were unconvinced. Finally he managed to get them to leave his passport, arguing that they had no use for it, and his watch because "A Bishop needs to know what time it is." It wasn't until after they were gone, and he heard a noise that Bishop Alphonsus realized that his watchman had been left, still bound and gagged, in a corner of his room. We were struck by how vulnerable Uncle Alphonsus is in his remote place. There was nothing really to be gained by calling the police in a place like that. The thing that Uncle Alphonsus really missed was his clerical ring. He borrowed one from one of the priests the next day so that he could officiate. He had requested that Uncle Albert bring his spare ring to the Bishops's conference that they were both going to attend later that month. Vally joked that Bishop Alphonsus loves it when people kiss his ring.

We have a video of Uncle Alphonsus visiting some of the villages in his diocese. I was struck by the gifts of livestock that people kept bringing him in the video, especially chickens. There would be a long line of villagers coming to greet him and receive his blessings, and they'd keep giving him chickens. I finally got to ask "What does Uncle Alphonsus do with all of those chickens?" The answer: He has started a poultry operation at the Bishop's compound.

The First Xmas Visit with the Bishop After dinner, Uncle Albert said he wanted to take a walk. He put on his cassock, and out we went. He wanted to pay an Xmas visit. He had a long list of Xmas visits that he was expected's feelings get hurt when he doesn't show up. We walked a few blocks, which was much easier now that it was night and the traffic had lightened up, and suddenly we were entering a compound with a sign on the outside that said "Mother Theresa's Home for the Dying Indigent." My first reaction was to wonder if this was something I was really ready to see, but I didn't have time to reconsider. Inside the compound was, as always, a large, homemade creche. The convent was to our right and the "home" was ahead, both long low buildings. The yard had concrete paths and on the sides of the path were beautiful flower beds. Everything was very clean. We were greeted by one of the nuns. Mother Theresa nuns are members of an order called the Missionaries of Charity. Their habits are white linen saris, with two blue stripes at the edge. I don't quite know how the saris work, because unlike ordinary women who wind up, as I have mentioned, with a "pallow" across their upper chests, the sisters wind up with the sari also coming over their heads. You've seen pictures of Mother Theresa, so I guess you have half an idea. I was told that there are Mother Theresa homes in, I think, 29 cities in India.

We were led into the home, and to my relief, no one was busy dying. Someone said that they only had to be dying when they were picked up, but were allowed to recover afterwards, but I think, actually they only have to be people who need their help. The residents lived in three large rooms filled with iron cots with thin mattresses, probably 3-4 feet apart, segregated by gender. When we came there, a lot of them were sitting on the floor, wrapped in blankets, watching television. They don't normally have a television there, I was told, it had been brought in for the holidays. Maybe they were watching a video, I never figured it out. There were basically three types of people in the home. The women were mentally ill and the men were retarded, although a few had TB. I would guess there were at least 100 people in the home. Theoretically the men with TB were supposed to be sent to a different home run by some Fathers, but sometimes they left there (escaped) and came right back to the Mother Theresa home and were allowed to stay. The mentally ill women received medical treatment and many were on psychotropic drugs. We followed the Bishop as he visited the rooms. It was strange to see someone whose presence meant so much. Many of the women were not watching TV, and some came to talk with us. One woman, when she found out that Vally was from the US demanded to know why he didn't have any Coca-Cola with him. A lot of the conversations were in Hindi, so I wasn't clear on what was going on. The Bishop dispensed blessings but when people tried to get him to deal with their specific situation, the sister would get him away. At one point we were walking through and the sister said to someone, "These people are from the US and they came here to visit you." The person to whom she said it, disfigured woman, lit up with a huge, joyous smile. It totalled me and I had to walk away to keep from breaking down. What I was seeing, what had happened to these people was so painful, even though they were the fortunate ones because they were being cared for. I had all kinds of conflicting thoughts. I kept hearing a voice, maybe Uncle Albert's, saying "See, they're such simple people and simple things bring them great joy." And this voice was somehow arguing that this was a wonderful way to be and something didn't feel right about that. The sister, and all the sisters I saw later (more Xmas visits tomorrow) received tremendous satisfaction from helping the poor. There were a few sisters caring for a large number of people and it reminded me of the Indian school teacher keeping control of 50 frightened students in her class. As I said, conflicting thoughts, but in the end, these are the only people in India who are doing anything for the poor.

We stopped in at the convent to visit the rest of the sisters and to nibble on some fruitcake. I was fascinated by the relationship between the sisters and the bishop. It was affectionate. They were all very excited to see him. The Bishop inquired about "Mother" and her health and it slowly dawned on me they were talking about Mother Theresa. To my surprise, although I did not follow the details, there was a kind of knowing look between Uncle Albert and the Mother Superior and she spoke of "Mother" in the way people speak about someone they love very much.

We returned to the Bishop's house, and I was ready to crash, but Uncle Albert wanted us to talk with him in the sitting area of his study. I realized that he knew that we would have very few chances to just talk. Right now I can't remember what we talked about which night, so I'll write a generic piece on "Conversations with the Bishop" tomorrow. Suffice it to say we finally got to bed and slept well under a double-sized, soft, warm blanket that the Bishop generously offered us, and it was quiet enough there that I got to sleep in both mornings.

Details After I finished the last letter, I remembered some more I wanted to say about Uncle Albert's appearance. I wanted to mention his totally erect posture, his full head of short steel-grey hair and the fact that he is clean shaven. In India, if you walk around the streets, you notice that almost all of the men have some facial hair-a mustache at the minimum. Muslim men also tend to have beards. Also, at least in the north, you see roadside barbers at work shaving people in an outdoor shop which consists entirely of a chair, a razor, some soap, a basin and a battered mirror. Vally says that some barbers don't even have a chair and seat their customers on a rock. Curiously, although Vally has a beard and all of his brothers have mustaches, in his father's generation everyone seems to be clean-shaven at the moment. Uncle Lawrence is also clean-shaven. Vally tells me that in India priests are either clean-shaven or have a beard, mustaches alone are pretty much verboten because they are supposed to be symbols of virility. The family is a male pattern baldness genetics experiment. Vally, Chrissie and Uncle Lawrence have most of their hair, as does Matthew at 22, although it is unclear that he will keep it. Tim and Bart at 27, as well as Vally's dad are nearly bald. Andrew, Albert's youngest brother, has a full head of hair colored an improbable shade of black. Bishop Alphonsus is also nearly bald. Of the other brothers 2 have hair and 2 are half bald.

The Family and the Church As you have undoubtedly noticed, the family is well-represented in the Catholic clergy. Vally's father is the eldest son among 12 children who survived to adulthood, among whom 4 boys and 2 girls went into the church. It is possible that the only reason Vally's father did not become a priest was that he had to leave home at 14 to go to work in Bombay to help support the family. Vally's mother is one of 6, among whom 1 boy and 1 girl went into the church. When Vally was growing up in Kattingere, the whole household said the rosary for 45 minutes every night. I'm sure they still do. On our trip, the only household where the rosary was said at night was in Pangla.

In Vally's generation no one has gone into the church. Actually, Vally thought he was going to become a priest but got a clear spiritual message when he was in college, that he was not called, and was pretty devastated by that. Chrissie set out to be a Jesuit, but lasted less than a year, and Linda was going to become a nun, but Uncle Edwin (one of the priests) suggested she see a little bit of the world first. She became an air hostess with Gulf Air and didn't look back. Vally once said to Eugene, over the phone, "You could have been such a good mother," and she answered sadly "I could have been anything, I could have been much much more."

A Very Full Day in Lucknow Back to our story. It was quiet in the Bishop's house because school was still out, and I was allowed to sleep late. Vally got up early and he and Eugene got to spend some time together. The plan was to tour, do some shopping, come back for lunch and then spend the rest of the day with the Bishop. Although we had our Lonely Planet tour guide with us, there was so much going on we scarcely remembered to look at it. We did manage to get steered to the worst Udipi restaurant of the whole trip, the Anapurna in Panjim, by reading the book, but usually we have found the Lonely Planet guides helpful on all of our trips, except Cuba where there wasn't one. It hadn't occurred to me that no idea what to expect.

The Bara Imambara We drove off to a place called the Bara Imambara. The Bishop's driver, Francis, whose father was also the (then) Bishop's driver, volunteered to be our tour guide. The road squeezed through a narrow opening in what used to be the wall to the city onto a broad busy street, and we parked in a crowded area across the street from what looked almost like a walled fort. I wish I could describe the huge stone gateway. It was probably 6 stories high, with three 3-story high archways. I guess there must be a moghul arch. It isn't a single curve, but rather two curves that meet at the top. Leading up to the curved part there were some sort of columns and the curved part was kind of scalloped. All this was set into a decoratively carved stone framework with bigger columns at the outside edges. Within, beyond the tall arches were three stories, two stories of windows at the top and one story of small archways at the bottom. The very top above the big archways had more small windows which seemed like lookouts and then above that was a carved cornice. The roof had a wall across it with almost minarets at the ends, and a network of arches between them.

We passed through an elaborate wrought iron gate in one of the main archways into a huge outer compound. The inside of the gate was also elaborately carved, with two fishes, leaping at each other above the curve of each side of the arch. There was a set of stone stairs all along the inside walls with clay pots of flowers on them. I forgot to mention something I noticed all through India which is that often, as at the Imambara, outdoor flowers are set in the garden in their flower pots, rather than planted in the ground. Francis started explaining where we were. I didn't really follow it all that well, but it was clear that this huge place was where the version of royalty that used to govern Lucknow before the British took over spent some of their time. I thought it was a palace, but Francis said the royal family didn't actually live there, it was more like a place for government functions. We were in the outer area. The walls continued all around the courtyard, beyond the huge gate and along them there was a wide roofed area, totally open at the front, and supported in front by columns connected by scalloped arches. It was similar in design to the area in front of the classrooms of the Catholic school, except there was a wall, not classrooms, in back. We saw this architecture again later in Agra. These covered areas were used as rooms, separated by curtains, or sometimes as stables.

We proceeded through another gate, this one through a wall about 12 feet thick, to another huge open area. The Bara Imambara, a huge, stone building constructed in 1784, was opposite us at the end of a long wide landscaped brick path. There was also a mosque to our right. The shape of the Imamabara was approximately rectangular, probably 8 times wider than it was high, with a lot of multi-story arched windows in front and what, again, looked like lookout windows in a line just below the cornice of the roof. According to the guide book, the Bara Imambara was constructed as the tomb of a Shiite holy man and was built as a famine relief project. As we walked towards the building, it seemed to me that the people looked different from the people we had seen earlier in the trip. Part of it was probably the weather, since the men wore sweaters and scarves. Part of it was that most of these people were muslims, so the women all had head coverings, some with covered faces looking like women you'd expect to find in the middle east, and the men's beards were not neatly trimmed. We had to take our shoes off to enter. I was wearing sandals without socks, so Vally nobly gave me his socks to wear. We were a little bit cold for the rest of the tour, walking on the stone floors in the cool weather.

The downstairs has a huge central hall which the guidebook says is 50 meters long and 15 meters high, and is one of the largest vaulted galleries in the world. It had a line of chandeliers down the middle and you could see that it was once painted blue and gold. There were some items on display, including two palanquins, which are the kind of coach that is on two straight poles and carried by bearers that the nawabs used to ride in. In Cochin, where there were also some palanquins on display, they said that only the king-equivalent could ride in one of those. There was also a crown on display. There was a second floor walkway, like a continuous balcony around the whole thing. There was a large room off to the side where, according to Francis, the nawab held court, and the ladies watched from upstairs. He also told us that the place was built so that the nawab of the moment would be safe from attack. This was achieved by creating an incredible maze of narrow, maybe 30" wide whitewashed hallways, passages really, starting above the first floor, that go up and down and all around. Without Francis' help we might still in be there trying to find our way out! The ceilings of the hallways are shaped like moghul arches, and everything looks the same, so you cannot get oriented. This maze is called bhulbhulaiya (bhul=lost, bhulaiya=forgotten). Francis told us that the nawab was captured anyway. The story goes that when the British came looking for him, in 1856, they were surprised that he hadn't run into the maze, and they asked him why. He explained that his servant was late in getting there, and he didn't have anyone to tie his shoes, so he couldn't run.

As we climbed the stairway from the first floor, Francis told us that a rich Arab had given one million rupees towards the restoration of the Imambara. The whole amount had been used up simply restoring this section of the stairway. We made it to the top, which is a flat area, surrounded by a high scalloped arch-filled double wall and decorated on top with a series of large, flattened, indented spheres with almost a bell-and-handle shaped piece on top. I supposed they were polished brass but now they are dull-looking and some of them are bent. The view was incredible. There were several other moghul structures in the area, but when we asked what they were Francis didn't know, and we got the feeling that people pretty much took these old buildings for granted. I was impressed by how huge the Imambara was. The walls were at least 3 feet thick. We couldn't imagine how much labor it took to build it. It looked like some restoration work was being done on the domes and ornaments at the top.

We went walking outside, towards the mosque which was on an enormous platform surrounded by stone stairs. Non-muslims are not allowed to enter. There was a large, square, 4' deep concrete pond outside the mosque, the kind you find around a fountain, except there was no fountain. Two muslin women were washing themselves. First they washed their arms and legs and faces, then they washed their mouths, using their fingers as toothbrushes. I was impressed that anyone would put that water into their mouth, but we figured they were purifying themselves before entering the mosque. Then an old white-bearded man came along and started yelling at them, so I guess they weren't supposed to be doing whatever they were doing.

Vally needed to pee so he asked Francis, in Hindi "Where is the piss house?" Francis, who lent dignity to all occasions, led him across the courtyard to the side opposite the mosque to an area where there were a lot of overgrown bushes. I had shot my last picture and needed another roll of film. There were vendors in the gate to the inner courtyard who sold film and I proposed getting it there. Almost by reflex, Eugene said "No, they'll charge us exorbitant prices, let's wait." Francis added, "We can get some outside." The vendors overheard and started yelling at Francis "Why are you taking our bread away from us. Why don't you let us do some business." We should have gotten the film there, because we didn't get it until much later, and missed out on some pictures. More than that, the roll we got later is now missing and we are holding out the slim hope that maybe it will be found at Chrissie's or at Eugene's place.

The Small Imambara Although time was getting short, we went to the Small Imambara. This was built in 1837, also as a mausoleum, and also as a famine relief project. Unfortunately, because we were running out of time and also because we didn't have any film, we only saw the outside and the grounds which were very beautiful. The style was very muslim, with minarets and elaborate carvings and a huge reflecting pool with lotus flowers blooming in it along the path from the front gate. It was a pleasure to be there looking at the surrounding. The nawabs of Lucknow had a reputation as patrons of the arts and I could see why.

The Aminabad Bazaar We wanted to go to the Aminabad market to get some kurta pajamas and some salwar kamizes. A kurta is one of those Indian outfits worn mostly by men which features a loose overhanging open-necked shirt and drawstring pants, both made of the same light cotton fabric. A salwar kamiz is the female version where the top is much longer, more like a dress and the ankles of the pants are gathered. Lucknow is famous a kind of embroidery called chiken which is found on the kurtas and the kamizes. Francis knew exactly where to go and soon we had our choice of dozens of shops in the covered market place. Even Eugene was impressed by the prices. A typical kurta was 125 Rs and salwar kamiz was about 170 Rs. We made some purchases and then Vally spotted a "real" kulfi stand. He went for it, as I watched in disbelief. Here's how it worked. The kulfi came in a kind of metal cylinder that was kept on ice. The boy who was serving first reached in and got a container of kulfi. He bobbled it, so it dropped in the dirt. He picked it up and then used a big knife to knock the layer of ice off the top. Then he set the container in a basin of water to loosen the kulfi. Then he took the same knife, rinsed it in the same basin of water and used it to pop the kulfi out onto a plate of unknown ancestry. Then, still using the same knife he cut the kulfi in half and reached with his hand, the same one that picked the kulfi up off the ground, into a pan of cold clear noodles and plopped a handful of noodles onto the kulfi before serving it to Vally. Although I tasted a tiny bit of what I hoped came from an unexposed surface, I did not have the courage to enjoy the kulfi. Nothing bad happened to Vally.

Lunch at the Bishop's House The rest of the market was a crowded blur. I remember an area outside where there were large carts loaded with books of all kinds, including some in English, but there was no time to browse. We hurried back for lunch. I had no idea what was in store for us, and thought idly that maybe we could kidnap the Bishop and force him to take a break since it was clear that even when he tried to give us his full attention, there were a million things on his mind. omen, one named Lucy and the other Titika. Lucy was the kindergarten teacher in the diocesan school. She also had a 5 year old and her husband had left her. She told me that she had 70 children in her class. I asked if the children were scared of her and she said "Of course," somewhat surprised by my question. Titika may also have been a teacher. She was unmarried and her dream was to come to the US and marry an American. She asked us to find her one, saying she'd prefer a black man because then he wouldn't leave her. Later Bishop Albert told us that both of them were orphans who had been taken in and raised at the Bishop's house. We found them refreshingly playful.

Xmas Visits with the Bishop What the Bishop had in mind for this afternoon was to cross some more Xmas visits off his list, with us in tow. Our first stop was the parish house where Uncle Albert lived for 1 year before leaving to study in Rome and then returning to teach at the seminary. He taught at the seminary, at the regional one at Allahbad and the local one in Lucknow, until he was appointed Bishop. We were outside the city, in an uncrowded rural area. The house was inside a compound and there was a creche, of course. No one was home, but we could hear large barking dogs inside. The building was nicely whitewashed on the outside, long and low, with a red tiled roof and a very nicely finished wooden door in the middle. There were beds of bright, beautiful flowers in pots along the paths. Since no one was home, we proceeded on our mission, planning to return later on our way back.

The Mother Theresa Leper Colony The next stop was another Missionaries of Charity convent. Actually, the St. Louis paper called them "Missionaries of Charity" but Eugene referred to them as "Sisters of Charity." Maybe both are true. The Bishop received an ecstatic greeting, there was chai and fruitcake and then we proceeded to the Mother Theresa Leper Colony. By now the day was taking on such a surreal quality, that is it was like in a dream when very strange things are happening but they seem completely normal. At the same time, at the time and now, I found the IDEA of going to India and visiting a Mother Theresa leper colony hilarious, because it was almost a caricature of our image of India. We planned to go on our own, but as we drove up the driveway, we saw a sister pedalling away on her bicycle, determined to get there first and orchestrate our tour. It looked like the movie poster from, I think it was, "The Sound of Music." We offered her a ride, but she insisted on going on her own.

The colony is located on 50 acres of land donated by the government, and is almost self-sufficient in food production. They also weave cloth which they sell. I was told that no one gets leprosy any more but the youngest leper I saw was a boy who appeared to be about 8. There are many leper couples in the colony and their children are healthy. The families live in little cinderblock one room houses, each house paired with another. There was a dirt road, and on each side of the road were these paired houses, about 30 feet apart, with adjacent pairs of structures facing a common yard. I think I remember communal privies. Each family had a very small plot of land, maybe the size of a large living room which was thickly planted. They also had goats, which mostly were tied up so that they did not eat the gardens, and we saw people wheeling in carts of green fodder for their animals. We went to the work area where they weave the cloth. First they wind the thread onto bobbins. There were a few people sitting on the ground outside, running hand-cranked machines that wind the bobbins. It looked like something out of the film Ghandi. Inside a kind of dark building, like a huge shed, about 10 people were weaving cloth, on hand looms. The cloth was very similar in texture to the cloth that you associate with Indian bedspreads, especially those from the 60's. Some were missing parts of their fingers and some had scarred skin. I asked if I could have a small piece of cloth as a sample and I was given one without hesitation and with a huge smile. No one seemed discomfited by the presence of visitors. The cloth was an off-white, purple and yellow checkered pattern. They must vary it though, because the thread that was being wound on the bobbins was bright red.

Next we went to the shoe-making shop. It was on a ground level porch at the side of the building where the people were weaving. Custom fitting shoes is very important in a leper colony, since people are missing parts of their feet. I gather too, that in some cases, the progression of the disease cannot be stopped, because some of the people who were being fitted had bandages on their feet and needed smaller shoes. The shoes were basically sandals, with open toes and wide brown leather straps coming up from the sides and buckling at the top. We also saw the furniture shop, which was also on the side of the building, just beyond the shoe shop, where they make all of their very simple furniture, mostly bed frames, chairs and tables. Men were smoothing pieces of wood with double-handled planes. Also, we saw women sitting on the ground outdoors, next to another building, processing food. Some women were cleaning rice. Others were splitting lentils. I never gave much thought to how lentils grow, but they form on the end of a long stalk, and after they are dried they need to be split. A stone of a certain weight is used with a grinding action, and the one lentil pops into two halves.

About 40 men, women and children were sitting around in an open, flat stone-tiled courtyard nearby, and some were taking down Xmas decorations, carefully rolling up the tinsel streamers. The sister kept emphasizing that everyone works. The Bishop went around, working the crowd, smiling, blessing people. One man, whose face was basically gone and was the most deformed person we saw, insisted on singing us a song. We saw someone roll up in a 4-wheeled, bicycle-like contraption that was hand powered. We were told that a man had made it for his wife after leprosy damaged her feet so badly that she could not longer walk. We were shown the school. I think they said that the children have their own school because they are stigmatized at the local school. They also have a hospital. They were proud of their dispensary which was basically a large cabinet full of medicines. A full surgical operating room is under construction and they are very proud of that. The physicians are all volunteers. Much is this work is funded by donations, especially foreign.

We walked on to the barn and saw the water buffalos, their ludicrous black heads lolling out over the tops of their stalls. I couldn't get over how ridiculous they looked. Their heads are huge and they have big horns which usually curve back down towards their faces. Compared to a cow, their snouts are flat and elongated and splay a little bit at the nose end. The look in their eyes can be described by one word "mindless." They refer to them as "buffalos" here. We went into the community center where volunteer leper tutors were providing after school help to groups of children. Supplies were few. Children were writing on individual small wooden chalkboards instead of paper. Then we were taken to the nursery. I was not ready for this. We went into the next building, into a large, low-ceiling room and to our left were two rows of cribs made of flat, wide iron strips. Not high-sided cribs, rather like larger versions of the plastic cribs that babies are put in in hospital central nurseries. There were at least a dozen them and each of them held a baby and in one case two babies. But these were not newborns. They ranged in age up to at least 5 months. There were no toys, no mobiles, just babies alone in their cribs. One baby, a girl about 4 months old was probably not going to make it. She was thin and feverish and curled up, crying weakly and miserably. There was also a much older boy, probably about 3 who had cerebral palsy and lay on his back in a bigger crib. If I had picked one of the babies up, I would have lost it completely. The two women taking care of them smiled happily, proud of their work. I'm sure compared to Bosnia or Rumania these children were well off. They said that most of them were abandoned or the children of lepers who could not take care of them. I asked what would happen to them and they said most of them would be adopted by the time they were 1. Seeing lepers with parts of their bodies missing did not really get to me, but seeing the babies was more than I could stand. Basically, the colony was a good place to live. Compared to every other place we saw, it was clean, well-maintained and peaceful. The people worked hard but they had a decent life, by Indian standards, for it.

We drove around a little more and then went back to the convent for more chai, fruitcake and adoration of the Bishop. The sisters suggested that we take a picture of the Bishop in the garden with the beautiful flowers. The picture is somewhere, on that ill-fated roll. I was struck by the fact that all of the Mother Theresa nuns had exactly the same happy energy. Eugene said that the order, which has no shortage whatsoever of applicants, is the strictest of all. Each nun takes a total vow of poverty. She basically has two saris, a sleeping mat and a bucket for washing-although the ones we saw had sweaters too. The sweaters, if any, have to be blue although the mother superior for some reason had managed a white one. They are not permitted to read anything from the outside, e.g. newspapers and magazines, and may visit their families once in 10 years. We also met a couple of Australian girls who had come to spend 3 months serving the poor. They were getting ready to go back. They said that it had taken them awhile to get used to being there but that it had been a good experience and they wanted to come back some day.

We climbed back into the Sumo and headed for Karunalaya. We drove through a metal gate that said "Karun" on one half and "alaya" on the other. Karunalaya is the place that the men with TB would sometimes run away from and reappear at the Mother Theresa home we had seen the night before. It was a totally male place, run by fathers, and they took care of men with TB and retarded boys. It was in the country, so it too was clean and peaceful. The set up was very similar, a low building where the priests lived and another building where the residents stayed. They had communal dorm rooms, although the retarded boys slept on mattresses on the floor in two different rooms, one continent and the other incontinent and there were a few smaller rooms for the men. It wasn't clear how the boys were diagnosed, since the one little boy who came and talked with us seemed bright and present and I am guessing he was learning disabled rather than retarded, and that distinction is not made. One man with TB made a little speech as we passed his bed, telling the Bishop, in Hindi, how much better he was feeling and how grateful he was that he was being given a chance in life. I was very glad for the man, and I was also glad that no one had coughed while we were in the room.

After we left the fathers' we went on to a retreat house/convent. It was a very nice place, full of light, very modern, lot of marble and stone, which would do fine for a retreat here in the US. As you may know, going on retreats is a very common thing, both for clergy and lay people in the Catholic church, probably more so in India. These retreats might last a week or so and could be devoted to prayer or to exploring some aspect of spirituality. Matthew and Vally's mom went on a retreat together, the one where he began to get in touch with his need for healing. There was more fruitcake, and I was struck by the difference in energy between the Mother Theresa nuns and these. There were 5 or 6 women in this convent and they were gracious and welcoming.

Although I no longer remember the order of things, we visited another convent. By then it was getting dark and we turned down their invitation for supper. However, one of the sisters had made a chocolate cake, and we couldn't resist that. They way they spoke about it, it was as if the ability to bake cakes was a rare talent. I don't know why. It's not as if the ingredients are unavailable but in fact it was the only really good cake we had the whole time we were in India. When the sisters found that the Vally's birthday was the next day, they insisted on singing "Happy Birthday" to Vally. I took a photo of the nun's chorus, but its on the lost roll.

I was starting to wonder how many more places we were going to be visiting. None of these places was more than 10 or 15 minutes apart, so I suppose we were covering the neighborhood. Our next stop was the Don Bosco school, which is a sort of Catholic Job Corps. School was not in session, and the resident priest was about to take a bath when we arrived, but we caught him in time. We sat down in a sort of waiting room, which was probably as close as it came to a living room there. There may have been more fruitcake. The priest was clearly a good friend of Uncle Albert's and the Bishop was more relaxed than we had seen him the whole time. I didn't pay much attention to what they chatted about because they clearly wanted to talk with each other, and we were perfectly happy to talk with Eugene.

Finally, we came back to where we had started from, the parish house with the dogs. Two priests lived there, one of whom owned the dogs. One of the dogs was a male German shepherd who was tied in the front hallway. The other was a female, a Rottweiler I think although I never saw her. She was locked behind a door, frantically trying to get at us. There wasn't going to be much left of that wooden door when she was through with it. She had puppies, who were 16 days old and it made me say. I've had dogs with puppies a few times, and 16 days old is just after they open their eyes, way too young to be taken from their mothers. Oh well, clearly if you want to get to me, take something away from its mother. Anyway, the mother dog was very protective and they didn't want to risk our safety by letting her out. The male dog was kind of smelly, and I accurately guessed that he was 8 years old. I enjoyed petting him. I have had two German Shepherds and I was reminded of why I love the breed. They let the dogs out at night to patrol the compound. We stood in hall and talked. There was, mercifully, no fruitcake. That night, Uncle Albert told us a story about the second priest-the one who wasn't the owner of the dogs. He was a bit of a problem. Uncle could not give him a parish because couldn't manage money. He had had a parish and because he was so gullible, the parish had run up a huge debt which the diocese had to take care of. He was also very absent-minded, the type who is not quite of this world. Once he parked his motor scooter and couldn't find it. I think he wound up losing it. He would forget to change his clothes. Once he came to the Bishop's house and they realized that he was sick and not taking care of himself. They made him stay until he was well. At the time, he had no socks, so Uncle Albert gave him a pair of socks. Uncle Albert saw him two weeks later, and he was still wearing the same socks. At the same time, Uncle Albert described him as a brilliant scholar and very spiritual. Uncle Albert has decided that the solution will be to create an ashram for him on the property at Karunalaya.

Finally, we went back to the Bishop's house for dinner. We weren't all that hungry and no one had any of the fruitcake that was offered for dessert. We had OD'd on chai also, as we later found out when we tried to sleep. After dinner, we again got to spend time talking with the Bishop.

Conversations with the Bishop Once of the things Uncle Albert talked about, as I mentioned, was how unsuited he felt to be a Bishop. We asked him to elaborate and he started by talking about how he felt when he was sent to Rome. Then too, he felt totally unsuited and did not want to go. He thought that his mission was to do parish work and the idea of going to Rome was to get a Ph.D. in theology which would put him on an academic track. Initially it was very hard, but at the 6 month point, when he had to option to just stay for one year total, he realized that he really loved the intellectual stimulation and elected to stay. Now he tries to send as many priests in his diocese as possible to Rome, for the experience. Bishop Alphonsus, too, has a Ph.D. but he started out as a Jesuit which is, by definition, a more intellectual vocation. But he too was asked to change his plans. At the time he was the Provincial of Calcutta. Jesuits don't owe their allegiance to the pope and they can't be bishops, but Uncle Alphonsus was asked by the pope to become a bishop. He declined, and the request became an order which automatically meant that he was no longer a Jesuit.

Being a Bishop has two aspects, the spiritual, with which Uncle Albert has no problem, and the practical, administrative, for which he considers himself totally unsuited. Father Martis actually handles the bookkeeping, but the politics are up to the Bishop. At one point he said "I get to hear things that the Bishop should not hear." On the other hand, in the grand scheme, because of his brilliant mind, I think he is doing a good job. His first priority was to make the parishes and the diocese financially accountable. He insisted on an annual audit, and opened the diocesan books. Half of their support comes from Rome, and he wants to reduce that by running things more economically. He realized that there was a disparity in the lifestyles of different priests in the parish and he worked to even things out by making their salaries and expense money more equitable. I remember he said they get 1000 Rs per month for household expenses, including the salary for their servant. Sometimes, it seems like Uncle Albert really shook things up. There was one priest, an academic, whom he assigned to run an elementary school in one of the really remote parishes-one that was accessible by 4-wheel drive only and had no electricity. Many Indian priests have war stories about their days in the remote parishes. This man was miserable, for about 2 months. And then something happened, he fell in love, head-over-heels in love with the children. Now he has totally devoted himself to improving their lives and spends every bit of money he can get, his personal money and his allowance on them. He has no interest in leaving.

One of the things that I haven't yet made clear, is that there are very few Catholics in Lucknow and virtually none, except clergy, in the remote villages. Most of the people in the villages could probably be called Pagan Hindus. Moreover, the Indian government has passed a law forbidding mass conversions and requiring a lot of documentation to prove that a conversion was not coerced. The way it used to work, sometimes, is that he missionaries would come to a remote tribal village where the local people had a nearly full-time job pacifying their very frightening and demanding deities. All the missionaries had to do was convince them that Jesus Christ would do that job for them, and presto! they had 250 new Catholics. Now, according to Uncle Albert, they get maybe 3 new converts a year. So all of this work, serving the poor, running schools, helping people improve their lives by teaching them about sanitation is done by the church for the local people. Uncle Albert said that the church there sees its role as a moral force. There are enough Catholics in Lucknow to fill the cathedral and there are certainly enough baptisms and marriages to perform, but, except in certain parts of India, like Goa, Catholics are a tiny, 1% minority.

We finally got to bed, and I had the choice between sleeping late and getting up by 7 AM to attend a private mass for Vally's birthday with the Bishop in his chapel. I chose to sleep, while Vally and Eugene went to mass. There was a birthday cake and more singing waiting for Vally in the dining room, but I slept through that too. The Bishop was headed out, with the seminarian who is about to be ordained, to visit a remote part of his diocese and he would drop us (with Eugene) at the airport on his way out. He told us how grateful he was to his brother, Father Matthew, for the gift of the Sumo, because the 4-wheel drive vehicle he used before that had left him sore and exhausted after similar trips. They were bringing an old bird cage with them. Someone explained that the Bishop's house used to have a parrot, but it had died, so they were taking the cage to one of the priests who had a parrot. They dropped us at the airport and Albert told Vally that he loved him. To me he said "Keep on keeping him happy." I was entertained by the thought that this was no time to get into a discussion of how people are responsible for their own feelings, and accepted his wishes. We were headed back to Dehli with Eugene, to spend some time at her convent. It was her fourth lifetime flight. One small incident. The plane was parked nearby and the transit bus was loading. It occurred to me that it would be just as simple, and actually more pleasant to walk to the plane, so we checked with security and they said fine. We headed off, taking a substantial number of people with us. There were two entrances to the plane, each with a staircase, and the one at front was crowded while the one at the back was relatively free. We headed for the back. Eugene was amazed. She said it would not have occurred to her to do either of those things, she would just have waited with everyone else.