Our travels with our children to India (eBook)

Our Travels with Our Children to India

(This is a free translation of my previous work: “Unsere Reisen mit unseren Kindern nach Indien” from German into English which has been a little modified at some places.)

To fulfill the desire of my grandson Luis, I wrote my biography, and this motivated me to write about my travels to India, undertaken by me some thirteen times between the years of 1974 and 2016 together with my wife Maria, my daughters Tara and Ina and my son Jussi, and sometime later with our grandchildren Lilia, Matilda, Dina, Luis and Adrian. These travels narrate the reminiscences of my by-gone days and the experiences and events of those times. We all remember so well our sojourns in India and wish to be there again and again.

1974

In this year began our first travel to India with my wife Maria and my daughters Tara (six years old) and Ina (three). At that time, a flight to a Third World country like India was not common and easy. Therefore, we had to take a train first from Bremen to Osnabruck (Germany) and from there to Amsterdam (Holland). Amsterdam was then the gathering point for overseas travels. In those days, flying was considered as luxurious, full of adventures and excitements. The greetings of the stewardess, exotic food served with silver cutlery, welcome drinks, the prompt services of air staff, and the joyful sight of travelers from different countries gave a unique flair of enjoyment. I think we were also on board of a long-distance plane for the first time. I only remember that we enjoyed the journey to Delhi. As soon as we left the airport, it was for the first time that Maria, Tara, and Ina saw so many people and so much poverty on the road as well as cows, goats, sheep, and dogs roaming freely over there. The rickshaws, taxis, camels, and elephants were waiting for customers. As recommended by a friend, we arrived at the Hotel Vikram in Lala Lajpat Nagar, which was supposed to have a swimming pool. Tara and Ina rushed to the pool but came back terrified, as they had seen some frogs jumping into the pool. At that time, Delhi was hardly developed and looked like a bureaucratic town. It was built as a new capital in 1931 by Edward Lutyens (1869 – 1944), where their administrative buildings and residences were constructed. Most of the Indians lived in old Delhi (purani Delhi), built by the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan (1592-1666). At dawn, Delhi became dark, calm, and deserted. We had difficulties finding a taxi or a rickshaw from Connaught Place to our hotel Vikram, some 4 kilometers (km) away. Mr. Gupta, a book publisher from Delhi whom I had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1972, took us in his car to the places worth seeing. He arranged for us to visit a dancing ceremony of a girls’ school in Daryaganj (purani Delhi), which was performed by the pupils wearing Indian costumes and dancing to Indian music. Tara and Ina were so much pleased to see it and to be among the small school children of India.

After a short stay in Delhi, we traveled to Agra on a state tourist bus with a guide. We left very early in the morning to cover the distance of 220 km to Agra. When we reached Mathura, some 160 km away from Delhi, most of us rested or were sleeping, but our guide woke up suddenly and said loudly: We are now passing the holy city of Mathura on the bank of the Yamuna, where God Krishna was born and lived with his beloved Radha and girl friends (Gopis). After this announcement, he dropped off to sleep again till we reached Agra. We visited the Taj Mahal, built by Shah Jahan for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal (1593–1631), the most visited mausoleum in the world. At the time of our visit, Agra looked like a rural place in every respect. We saw animals grazing and carts moving around the Taj. After the guide had shown us the Taj, he sent us to the shops of handicrafts and artifacts, where he surely received his share of the profits from. On our way back to Delhi, we visited Sekunderabad, 10 km away from the Taj, where the massive tomb of Akbar the Great (1556–1605) is situated. There a horde of well-fed monkeys followed the visitors and snatched food stuff from them. Tara and Ina remained close to us to avoid the touch of the monkeys. Due to the shortage of time, we did not go to the ruined city of Fatehpur Sikri, where Akbar the Great had lived for some time, debated with the religious heads of Hindus, Muslims, and Christians, and founded a universal religion (din ilahi) there. We returned to Delhi late in the night.

From Delhi, we traveled to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, located 288 km away from Delhi and founded in1728 by Maharaja Jai Singh. Ina had lost one of her shoes somewhere in the train, so after reaching Jaipur, we first took a Rickshaw to buy a pair of shoes for her. Then we went to a hotel which had been recommended to us by the tourist office at the Jaipur Station. The hotel belonged to a British lady, a widow of one of the Maharajas of Jaipur. Unfortunately, we do not remember anymore the name of that beautiful hotel, surrounded by small cottages for the guests. But we do remember a tree in the courtyard of this hotel that was full of singing colorful birds and parrots typical of Rajasthan. Our children became so much fascinated by the presence and sounds of the birds that they listened to them for hours. We visited the palaces and residences (hawelis) of the Maharajas, the Wind Palace (hawa mahal), known for its windows (jharoka) for the Maharanis to see from outside. After sightseeing, we went shopping for handmade things. Maria bought some Rajasthani wooden figures from a farmer on the street; one of them is still now in our home in Bremen. After our return to Delhi, we took a train to my home in Shakra, as there were no direct trains from Jaipur to the state of Bihar then.

We reserved a compartment of our own for that journey of 1200 km to my place. In comparison to other villages, my village was better developed. It had a middle and a high school, a railway station (Dholi), a post office (daakghar),a police station (thana), a registry office (kachehri), a bazaar, and a haat (grain and vegetable market) in the evening. All that because of a British family who had a big farm in Dholi near our village on the bank of a river of burih Gandak (an old arm of the Ganges). The journey to our railway station in Dholi required more than two days of the journey from Delhi. There were only coal engines at that time, the railways ran on narrow gauges and had one-way lanes. Due to the lack of bridges and construction work for broader lanes, the trains took longer routes and more time. But we were in no hurry and had sufficient space for us in our compartment to relax and sleep in our up and down beds. We enjoyed the passing landscape, the coming and going of the passengers at the stations and the sellers of foodstuffs in our compartment and on doorways. On the whole, we arrived well in Shakra and our old house was still there, which was built in 1934 after the great earthquake with a scale of 8,4 in North Bihar and South Nepal. I was welcomed like a lost son with my new family members. I had not been there for some 12 years. Very soon, Maria, Tara, and Ina were surrounded by my family and our village inhabitants, who had never seen such faces before. My family was well prepared for us; the house was white washed, well cleaned, an electric fan hung in our sleeping room, and an anti-septic toilet was ready to use. But we soon noticed that electricity seldom functioned and only at awkward times when we were sleeping. So, we used the kerosene lamps for lighting and the stove to boil the water for drinking and washing. The food was prepared on a clay stove (chula), usually by a eunuch (hijra, mauga) and a deaf and dumb woman (bathia). Before the final settlement of the marriage our eunuch was often sent by us and other landed gentry to visit secretely the bride to check her body. Our house maids had no names, and no one knew where they came from.

Our relatives from nearby villages visited us and brought us the local specialty, a cackling hen or a duck. But they also came to peep into our room to see Maria in the permanent state of smoking and drinking whisky, a widely prevalent opinion of a white woman, the so-called Memsaheb, shared by the Indians. My maternal grandmother who, after the death of her only son, patronized me as her son was extremely happy to see me with my wife and my children. To keep the children busy with events, she let a tree climber (pasi) come to pluck down a coconut from a palm tree and presented the coconut milk to the children. She showed the children how to make green bananas ripe by keeping them underground and heating them from outside. Every day she arranged for the delivery of toast bread and cake from the city of Muzaffarpur (District town), 20 km away from Shakra, which were still made there by an old baker, who used to work earlier for the British. To show Maria, Tara, and Ina a traveling theatre (natak), a snake charmer (sapera), a dancing bear (bhalu), and the marriage of monkeys (Bandar ki biah) before our house were arranged. The children rode a buffalo or a pony, played with goats and discussed among them, who had the best goat. The children kept themselves busy for some hours by building a heap of rice and wheat on the veranda of our house and selling the pile among themselves. Tara once came to Maria in a hurry and reported to her mother that she had seen her grandmother spitting blood out of her mouth. On our inquiry, we came to know that she chewed betel nuts (paan) and spit out the red stuff into the pot. To her big surprise, Maria saw my grandmother once drawing a swastika (Hakenkreuz) with her finger on a heap of the newly harvested rice. She told us that...