​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 80 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 




Sherrill and Bruce with robot friend who, oddly enough,
seemed to be the mascot at Runnymede,
where the Best of English Gardens tour began.

​              Norway, where the Northern Lights flirt with the midnight sun and blue ice glaciers feed the bottomless fjords, was going to be our big trip for 2014—Norway and tiny Andorra were the only countries in western Europe that we'd missed.  We planned it detail, made and paid for all the reservations.  After a day in London, we'd fly to Oslo, look around for a few days, then take the Bergensbanen railway line past mountains and waterfalls, seven hours on one of the world's most scenic train rides, to Bergen on Norway's western coast, where we'd board a ship for the journey north, in and out of fjords, past the Arctic Circle, then back down, visiting different fjords and towns on the way south.  It all was arranged, a perfect trip.  

​              Then Sherrill's doctor discovered that something wasn't right with her.  Tests revealed that cancer had, in fact, been secretly, stealthily, invading.  Surgery was next, instead of Norway, followed by a year of radiation and chemotherapy.  That took care of 2014.  She handled it well, all things considered.  Family and friends helped with driving her to treatments.  A kind friend gave her a wig when her hair started falling out, folks brought meals and helped out in many ways. 
​              As she gained strength after this year-long ordeal, she discovered a Best of English Gardens tour that she wanted to do to celebrate her recovery: visiting some of the most famous and iconic gardens of England, ending with the annual Chelsea Flower Show in London.  Her oncologist said that there was no reason why she shouldn't take the trip.  
              "I can do this," she told me, as we packed.  "Don't worry." 

​              As we'd traveled around the world, we'd prowled through many gardens: from lush tropical gardens in Asia and Latin America to austere French gardens with broad paths, topiary trees, and precise flower beds; from walled Moorish and Spanish gardens, often hidden in courtyards, to the rambling countryside gardens of the British isles; from stylized Japanese gardens with carefully raked gravel riverbeds and perfectly placed rocks to the delicately hued gardens of old China. 
              Sherrill's favorite gardens, the ones most congenial to her, were the deceptively casual-appearing gardens of England, with their planted "rooms" of different colors and textures and their herbaceous borders that offered unexpected delights to the eye.  This was the style that had influenced Sherrill when she designed and created her own garden in Berkeley.   

​              For centuries, gardens had inspired, teased, and charmed British writers, painters, and lovers.  Even in lousy weather, the British pulled on their boots and slickers and energetically mucked about in the flowerbeds.  Everyone had a theory about gardening and shared it, if given a chance.  They were generous with their experience and knowledge, offered advice, and wished you well with your own gardening efforts.  
              Gardens, I think, gave Sherrill hope.  These living, growing, places of beauty promised that there would be a future.  Seeds would germinate, plants would grow, flowers would blossom.  They attracted and nurtured birds, butterflies, and bees.  The tour visited many of the most famous and influential English gardens, ranging from very personal ones such as Wendy Dare's little hillside terraces next to an old Gloustershire mill to the large, formal, gardens of Stourhead in Wiltshire and Hidcote Manor in the Cotswolds to the eccentricities of writer Vita Sackville-West's garden rambling among the ruins of a castle.
              We allowed ourselves time in London, both before and after the tour, to visit other gardens in the vicinity, as well.  A short trip on the Underground took us to Hampstead, where we walked up a curving hillside road to Fenton House, a 17th century red brick National Trust mansion with a terraced walled garden, topiary shrubs and trees, sunken garden, and rose garden. 
              "I've seen this before," Sherrill said as she sat on a bench beneath a purple wisteria on the upper terrace, looking toward the house.
              Then we both remembered where: The gardens had been one of the locations in a BBC miniseries about a 1930s jazz band, Dancing on the Edge.  It projected the posh yet stylish atmosphere needed for the scene.  

​              Even more exciting for Sherrill was a visit to Eccleston Square, a large fenced garden for the early 19th century homes surrounding the square, opened to the public as a fund raiser once a year.  The garden had been redesigned by a well-known author and gardener Sherrill had seen on television.  We wandered along the garden paths and peered into a large potting shed, Sherrill making notes, enjoyed tea and cake under an arbor, then by chance met the old fellow, now in his eighties.  He and Sherrill immediately were friends, talking about the garden, his books, and his  ideas about gardening.  

​              A visit with our friends David and Catherine had been high on our list, so we took a train out to see them in Richmond.  After drinks in the secret garden behind their house (tulips and ceanothus still in bloom), followed by lunch, they drove us to vast Richmond Park nearby, where we spied grazing deer among green fields and trees before reaching a section known as the Isabella Plantation.  A stroll among blooming trees and shrubs left us goggle-eyed: giant azaleas and rhododendrons of startling shades of red, pink, white, yellow, and peach—even purple and blue—as far as we could see in every direction.  Apparently, the deer knew that they all were poisonous.  

​                We joined the Best of English Gardens tour at Runnymede, where we saw brightly painted narrow boats cruising along the river, then headed off with the group into the Cotswold hills.  The plan seemed to be two great gardens a day, with lunch in between.  Sherrill had managed quite well so far with walking, but we hoped that the garden visits would give her opportunities to rest, now and then. 
              Rosemary Verey was a formidable name among serious gardeners, so Sherrill was pleased when we began with gardens that Verey designed in the 1950s for the 17th century manor, Barnsley House.  Following the paths leading from the mansion, we discovered lawns framed by topiary plantings, herbaceous borders in full bloom, knot gardens, a laburnum walk, and ornamental fruit and vegetable gardens, each section rich with gorgeous, sometimes whimsical, surprises. 
              Of course, Sherrill pulled out her notebook and pen and began jotting down ideas.  She soon made friends with other gardeners on the tour, especially a woman from Massachusetts who had two homes with gardens and a landscape gardener from Grass Valley in northern California.  

​              Mill Dene, the afternoon's garden, was completely different, built on a steep slope cut into many terraces, above a stream and historic mill.  Wendy Dare, who created it, led us around, stressing that she and her husband had built every part of it by hand, themselves. 
              "Every terrace, large or small, every path and step, all the plantings and beds.  We weren't rich, so we couldn't hire it done, but we loved doing it." 
              "Sounds familiar," Sherrill smiled. 
                                                         *              *             * 

​              Within the golden walls surrounding Hidcote Manor, we discovered a variety of linked gardens.  Joining our new friends, we made our way through doorways cut into hedges and brick garden walls, past rows of precisely pruned trees, along brick and gravel paths, and up and down flights of steps.  These were the much-copied garden "rooms" created by Lawrence Johnston beginning around 1900.  We'd pass through an arch cut into a yew hedge or through a wrought iron gate and discover a Fuschia Garden or Poppy Garden or his famous Long Walk.  These different growing spaces, Sherrill told me, had been designed to slowly unfold, revealing a new vista or atmosphere at each turn.  She had read Johnston's books and tried some of his ideas in her own much smaller Berkeley garden.
              "He was influenced by Gertrude Jekyll," she reminded me, with tap of her notebook on my shoulder.
              To a gardener, that was like saying he was influenced by Leonardo or Rembrandt.  

​              After lunch, we saw something totally different: a grand house and its hillside garden in what once was called the "Indian style."  Sezincote House, designed by Samuel Pepys Cockerell in 1805, was built when British India was becoming the "jewel in the crown" of the empire, flaunting a Mughal-style dome and arched windows, with gardens that showed the Hindu-style influence of natural-looking ponds and walkways with spots to sit and meditate, a temple withthe goddess Souriya, a pavilion curving from the house.  When the Prince Regent visited, he liked it so much that he changed his vision for the Brighton Pavilion from Chinese to Indian. 
              "You're not making notes, now," I mentioned to Sherrill. 
              "Nothing here inspires me."                                

           Then there was Stourhead, on our itinerary, but more vast park than garden.  It had more in common with Richmond Park than any manor.  Its meadows, forested hills and paths, lakes and streams, were speckled with classical temples, grottos and follies, classical statues and bridges, even a weathered water wheel.
              Once again, Sherrill didn't bother to make notes. 
                                                          *            *             *

              The day we returned to Sissinghurst clouds were bumbling across a blue sky overhead.  We'd been here in 1968, but had been eager to see it again.  Walking through the arched brick gate into the first garden "room," we stopped to catch our breath.  The years had given the garden a new polish.  It had seemed more of a work in progress, before.  Of course, we reminded ourselves, all gardens were a work in progress.  Nothing alive was static. 
              Novelist and gardener, Vita Sackville-West, with her diplomat husband, Harold Nicolson, created a unique world when they transformed the ruins of a fortified manor house into their personal retreat and garden. 
                  Climbing to the top of the sixteenth century tower, we could see the garden's various "rooms"— the "white garden" and other beds with spring blossoms opening, tulips, bluebells, wisteria, roses, azaleas, and more.  Our garden didn't have a moat to cope with, as Vita famously wrote about in one of her gardening books, but Sherrill did pick up some ideas from the planting arrangements and color combinations.  Maybe the most important lesson was to be fearless.  If something doesn't work, change it.  

​              On our way to the Royal Horticultural Society Gardens at Wisley, we saw a sign next to a private driveway warning "Trespassers Will Be Composted."  The society, founded in 1804, developed, tested, and gave advice about flowers and plants, helped educate gardeners, and promoted gardening with flower shows—a very English kind of organization, it seemed to me.  Walking among the Wisley gardens gave Sherrill lots of good ideas, but the place was vast.   After a while, we relaxed and just enjoyed the beauty. 
              Sherrill particularly had wanted to see Great Dixter, a 15th century house and garden to which gardeners from around the world made pilgrimages.  She'd read the books by Christopher Lloyd, who'd spent more than 40 years transforming the garden, experimenting with ideas about plant combinations, colors, scale, and texture.  Although she didn't always agree with his theories, she'd incorporated some of his ideas into our garden—especially about herbaceous borders. 
              "They really should be called masala borders," Sherrill said, with twinkle, using the Hindu word meaning "a mixture."  

              Lloyd had been dead almost seven years when we were at Great Dixter, but with his head gardener, Fergus Garrett, he had created a program of young gardeners coming from around the world for two years each to learn gardening the Christopher Lloyd way.  One of the young gardeners gave us a tour.  Even more exciting for Sherrill, she managed to talk with Fergus Garrett about how he was using and adapting Lloyd's ideas. 
              Back in London, we spent most of a day at the Royal Horticultural Society's Flower Show in Chelsea.  The day before, the Queen had officially opened it and the next day it would be opened to the general public.  Some people had dressed up for the occasion, as if they were going to the Ascot races, others not so much.  Although there were a number of large indoor pavilions, the big garden displays that competed for prizes were outside.  The grand prize went to a garden sponsored by the Chatsworth Manor estate.

​              "That just shows the power of money," Sherrill said.  "Those huge rocks brought all the way from Chatsworth.  Not what I call a garden."  
              However, she did collect a number of ideas from the display gardens.  This was the end of our tour, so the next day the two of us took a train to the coastal town of Rye, which she had wanted to see for a long time, particularly Lamb House and garden, where Henry James had lived for several years.  The Chelsea Flower Show wore her out, so a train ride was a chance to rest. 

​              A little town clinging to steep streets above the English Channel, many of its buildings from the Middle Ages, Rye was a good place to relax after more than two weeks on the road.  Our hotel, the Mermaid Inn, was 500 years old, but comfortable—despite creaky floors and groaning stairs.  A short walk away, we found the brick house where Henry James had lived and its walled garden.  We even indulged in tea and cookies while sitting among the spring blossoms. 

​              We ate the best meal of the trip—a fusion of south Indian, English, and French cuisines—the next day in a little restaurant on a side street.  We enjoyed the wonderful food while looking through a window at the remains of a medieval monastery next door.  When we toasted each other with glasses of wine, the waitress got the idea that it was our anniversary and at the end of the meal brought us a "present" from the chef: a little cake on which he'd written "Happy Anniversary." 

​              On the train back to London, we shared a compartment with two French couples drinking champagne from wine glasses and their three kids.  One little girl stared at us, when she wasn't licking the window.  One morning in London, we took the Tube to the Canal Boat Museum.  One of our favorite trips had been when we rented a narrow boat with Simone and Paul and guided it along the Llangollen Canal from Chester into Wales.  After a couple of hours exploring the museum, we took a narrow boat tour into the Regents Canal and through the second longest tunnel in Britain, built in 1820. 
              "I love this," Sherrill whispered, squeezing my arm.  

               ​Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill House and gardens in Twickenham was a surprise to Sherrill.  A strange place of witch's hat-topped towers, arched windows, turrets and battlements, and other gothic nonsense, it was appropriate for the author of The Castle of Otranto—plus an array of strange cat statues posing in the "garden."
              "Maybe, if you call a place a garden," Sherrill said, staring at the human-sized cats frolicking on the grass, "it is."  

​              The next day, Sherrill got a longer boat ride when we took a ferry from the Embankment Pier in central London along the Thames all the way to Canary Wharf in London's East End to see the London Docklands museum.  The area, called Poplar, for decades a slum, had been transformed into the new financial center of London.  We had lunch at an outside restaurant, surrounded by the glittering banking towers that now stood where docks, warehouses, and slum apartments used to sprawl. 
              Two more days in London took us to William Morris's Red House at Blexleyheath and Kensington Palace and Gardens, all enjoyable, but we were ready go home.  It had been a good trip, even though a lot of it was a challenge for Sherrill.  Nevertheless, as the weeks and months went by, we started making plans for more trips and good times together.  

              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 79 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 



Sherrill, Ukraine, 2013

​              The two girls might have been sisters, just out of school, pink-cheeked, one blonde, one brown-haired, sixteen and seventeen in their first jobs as waitresses on the Lomonosov as it maneuvered along the Black Sea coast and up the Dnieper River, their clever smiling faces bright with ambition and optimism.  They had grown up in a better, more promising, world than their parents and grandparents had known and, using their language skills and wits, were eager to make the most of its opportunities.  I often wonder about them when I remember the trip that Sherrill and I took through Ukraine in 2013. 

​              Ukraine Airlines ferried us from London to Odessa, then—with the help of a young woman who saw that we were struggling to communicate—we took a taxi from the tiny airport to the 19th century Ayvazovsky Hotel in the old part of town.  The next morning, starting at the wide hill-top square that overlooked both the bay and the gawky hotel planted by the Communists at the end of a graceless pier, we hiked down the broad, profoundly evocative, 192 stairs that descended to the port—the Potemkin Steps made famous in Eisenstein's epic film Battleship Potemkin.  We might have been transported to another world, one accessible only in black and white movies.   Then we discovered a bizarre statue of a muscular baby ripping its way out of a concrete shell, supposedly representing the birth of a "new era."   

​              At the ship, Sherrill and I met our friend Tom, who had traveled with us in 2007 along the Dalmatian Coast from Slovenia to Athens, and now had joined us again.  That earlier trip also had been through countries adjusting to a new, recently liberated, society.  Some, such as Croatia, were finding it easier than others, notably Montenegro and Albania, and, as always seemed to be the case, young people found it easier than the older folks.   
              The 200 year-old Odessa catacombs that hid resistance bands during World War Two could have been from another old movie, but even more fascinating to us were the great caves at the Black Sea military port of Sebastopol, still the biggest maritime base for the Russian and Ukrainian fleets—and Russia's only warm water port.  Deep underground, we explored huge caverns that had been a secret nuclear submarine installation during the Cold War, even a vast underground dry dock for submarines.  Although these caverns no longer were used, the port still was an active military base, so we weren't allowed to take photographs outside the caves. 

​              We sailed from Odessa to Yalta's wide bay, forested mountains descending in front of us to the blue-edged white crescent of the city—a resort town of 80,000, rather like Santa Cruz, but with a port for ships.  We toured the bulky white palace built for the czar in 1911 where the final World War II conference was held in 1945 and heard a lot about how Roosevelt was so sick that he gave in to Stalin's plotting and lying.  The Ukrainians still resented that they ended up part of the USSR.   Then Sherrill, Tom, and I took a taxi to a small graceful house surrounded by gardens in the low hills above the city—where Anton Chekhov spent his last years, writing some of his most well-known plays and stories, still crowded with his furniture, clothing, and random possessions.  We could feel that his spirit lingered there, that it might even pick up the pen resting on the stained desk blotter. 

​              Across the garden, in a discreetly tucked away visitors' center, a large room displayed historic photographs of the playwright and his life in the theater.  A group of women visitors sat on folding chairs while a plump middle-aged woman gave an impassioned presentation in Russian, shawl draped dramatically around her shoulders, describing and acting out with great emotion scenes from the plays.  On a screen behind her, large letters declared in both Russian and English: "Chekhov—the Tennessee Williams of Russia."
              Sailing on the Black Sea and up the Dnieper River through the heart of Ukraine was the best part of the trip for Sherrill.  The stops along the way to visit various towns, churches, palaces, and historic sites were interesting, but moving along the cloud-speckled water under the transparent blue sky, watching the variegated colors of the shore pass by, feeling the caressing motion of the four-deck river ship, made her the happiest.  The river flowed down to the sea, but—passing through five locks—we chugged against the current all the way up to the 1,500 year-old capital city of Kiev, called in Ukraine "the Mother of Cities."  

​              During the trip, Sherrill, Tom, and I became friends with a couple from New Jersey with whom we instantly felt at  ease.  A year later, Sherrill and I had dinner with them at a restaurant overlooking the San Francisco waterfront and expected to get together with them in the future.  However, shortly after that Sherrill became sick, changing our plans.
              The names of the cities along the way sounded as exotic as the sights we discovered in them.  Two that I especially remember: Kherson , founded by Catherine the Great and home to the fabulous Cathedral of St. Catherine, and Zaporozhye, where we discovered Neolithic goddess figures displayed in a park and where the Cossacks stunned us with their skillful, frantic, insane horsemanship.  Every town had raised a huge monument to the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis and Lenin's stolid bulk was on display more often than we'd expected.  

​              The sun was shining and autumn leaves glowed red and orange gold.  The young parents romping with their kids on a Sunday afternoon in a Kiev park, taking photographs with their mobile phones, could have been in California or England.  However, this new, free, society was hard for older generations who struggled to survive in it.  I remember robust older women, red-cheeked in their kerchiefs, reduced to selling lottery tickets or their family treasures, even sweeping and raking in the public park.  They missed  the old ways, but admitted that the new world was better for young people.  
              They remembered that although the Ukraine was considered the bread basket of the Soviet Union, 7 million of its people, mostly children, had died of malnutrition because Stalin insisted that the grain it produced be exported.  Peasants were shot if they hid grain for their families.  One old lady in Kiev, her little body hidden under her kerchief and raincoat, constantly rearranged her treasures to tempt people who might pass—bulky socks and scarves that she'd knitted, an old table lamp, several ashtrays of varying sizes and shapes, dishes and glassware that had survived from once complete sets, small figurines, a bust of Lenin, Communist medals.  We didn't need any of it, but Sherrill and I wanted to give her a few hryvnia.
              "Okay," Sherrill told me, tugging at my shirt collar. "but not Lenin."  

​              Our hotel was wedged into a corner of a steep, twisting Old City street among art nouveau and neoclassic buildings and some gold-domed churches.  Despite the bombing during World War II, a lot seemed to have survived.  We visited a large museum dedicated to Ukrainian history and several small museums, including one focused on the eccentric history our hotel's hillside street.  
              Walking along the city streets and boulevards, sitting in a basement cafe, exploring shops and museums, we were struck that the people of Kiev dressed almost entirely in black, often black leather (or faux leather) jackets and dark blue jeans.  For the most part, the clothes were of cheap fabrics and badly made, but the large men we saw standing in small groups near expensive black automobiles wore the real thing.  In smaller cities we'd visited, we'd noticed thirty year-old Russian Lada cars, often decorated with dents and rust, but here we saw shiny Mercedes, Porsches, and BMWs, although ordinary people crowded onto antique buses and streetcars.  Kiev was a city of contrasts, rich or poor, new or old, powerful or weak, ordinary citizens or those with "contacts." 

​                 Despite all this, we often were told that "life will get better.  It just takes time."
              Maybe a woman we met outside a small chapel near the Yalta waterfront best symbolized this optimistic spirit.  When we peered through the open door into the ornate Orthodox chapel, she rushed out, showing her single tooth and gums in a smile and asking in simple English where we were from.  When we said America, she grinned even more broadly.
              "Amerrrica!" she shouted.  "New Yorrrk!"
              And she told us that once upon a time she had danced at Radio City Music Hall.  Did she expect us to believe that she'd been a Rockette in her youth?  Well, why not?  Her husband was dead, now, and her children were gone, but she insisted that life was good.  

                                                      Woman selling aprons, Kiev

​              Ukraine, like Russia, was filled with widows because men there died years before their wives, chiefly because they smoked and drank so much.  Independence from the Soviet Union created hope for the future, but also hardship.  The change was especially hard for men, women told us.  Suddenly, they didn't have jobs and couldn't support their families.  Women frequently became the major providers in their households, which drove the men to drink even more.  We saw posters urging men to say no to drink, but the campaign didn't seem to be working.  The average Ukrainian male died before reaching sixty.  



No vodka!  poster, Kiev

​              When we were there, Ukraine presented two faces, like those ancient Greek masks, smiling toward western Europe on one side and toward Russia and the east on the other.  Everyone was equal under the Soviets, but—as George Orwell pointed out—some were more equal than others.  Most of those under 40 wanted to embrace the West, now, abandon the patronage of Russia, and escape the corruption still plaguing their country by joining the European Union.  Some older Ukrainians, though, feared the materialistic values and lack of morality in the West.  In Kiev, we saw a parade of priests, nuns, and Orthodox church members carrying banners denouncing homosexuality.  Earlier, we'd discovered that orthodox Ukrainians did a lot of crossing and candle burning, although not as much as we'd seen in Bulgaria.

                                                    "Taking Care of the Hungry Man"

​              "When it was obvious that the Soviet Union was collapsing," somebody else told us, "the Communist party bosses here were the first to love the free market—and were all for business and industry to go private, as long as they got their share."   
              Several times, talking with people in Ukraine, we heard how the former Communist leaders quickly dominated the new government and snatched control of major industries and utilities during the privatization process—embracing the future by using tricks from the past.  This was an irony that the great Ukrainian satirist Mikhail Bulgakov would have appreciated. Bulgakov struggled against Soviet censorship though his whole career.  His greatest work, the novel The Master and Margarita, wasn't published until 26 years after his death in 1940.  

​              When we visited Bulgakov's house, number 13 on a winding hillside street in upper Kiev, we saw a parade of young men and women not only visiting the rooms in which he lived and wrote, but also taking photographs of the house, the plaque on its facade, and the life-sized statue of the writer in a small garden.  They took turns posing with Bulgakov, their arms around his shiny bronze shoulders. This rebel from a bygone era spoke to young Ukrainians all these years later. 
              Before we left Kiev, Sherrill, Tom, and I gave ourselves a splendid, typical Ukrainian dinner at a hillside restaurant in a wooden 19th century building with traditional scalloped trim that looked out over much of the city.  It probably was overpriced, but still was an enjoyable way to say goodbye to Kiev and Ukraine.  I'm not sure which of us ordered what, but I remember green borscht with nettle, dumplings with mushroom sauce, goose pate (that was Sherrill), duck breast, and Chicken Kiev.  Plus a local wine and to finish local cheeses and Cake Kiev.  

​              Soon after we returned to California, Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine, claiming that they were there to protect the rights of Russians who lived there.  The scenes flashed across the globe: the massive police and military reaction against the citizens who dared raised their voices against the Ukrainian Old Guard.  Independence Square in the capital of Kiev was transformed from the bustling center of a busy city that we saw in October into a potential battle zone. 
              For more than 20 years, Ukraine had struggled to get its arms around its new independence—the first time in its long history that it had been independent.  Or was it independent?  That was the question that many Ukrainians were asking.  Was the country a province of Russia—or was that where it was headed?  Despite the corruption and threats, the Ukrainian population seemed determined to pull through, this time.  
 

​To be continued.... 
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 78 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 


​
Sherrill, 2013

​              As fascinating as the West Bengal tribal area of Eastern India was, exploring it wasn't easy.  The terrain was difficult and often undeveloped and most of the people there weren't used to foreigners, so we couldn't predict what might happen.  However, our group was small and our local guides spoke the dialects so we were allowed into tribal villages and even watched ceremonies outsiders had never seen.  However, curious villagers staring and pushing to get close—especially the young people—could be difficult and exhausted Sherrill.  Being stared at by strangers made her very uncomfortable.
              For four hours, our SUV bounced and lurched over narrow, crumbling, mountain roads to a remote village in a forested area where the people still lived as they had hundreds of years ago.  When I checked the car as we got in, I couldn't find any seat belts where Sherrill and I were going to sit.  I asked our handsome, dark-skinned young guide about it.  He just smiled.
              "We never use them."
              "Well," I told him, "we're not going anyplace without them." 

                                                             Tribal village man showing
                                                                 charms to keep away
                                                                 evil spirits

​              He looked at me with disbelief.  A nice fellow and an excellent guide, but obviously we were from two very different cultures.  Apparently, they trusted to the will of the gods, to chance, while Sherrill and I preferred common sense.  Finally, reluctantly, he took apart the seats, found the seatbelts, and fixed them so we could wear them.  He and the driver, however, never did wear theirs.  

​              Once again, we parked up the road from the village.  It was market day, so the narrow dirt streets were filling with people who had hiked down from even more remote villages higher in the mountains.  Unlike other places we'd visited in this part of Eastern India, foreigners weren't particularly welcome.  We did our best to wander discreetly among the villagers who were buying and selling local produce and other wares.  People from the most distant villages had walked barefoot as far as 20 kilometers through mountainous jungle, despite snakes, leopards, wild boar, jackals, and other wild animals.  Tigers weren't usually seen in that area, but there were no guarantees.


Bathra tribe villagers

​              The women of that mountain tribe were unmistakable when they walked into the hillside market: small, dark brown, with delicate features, different from the women of the other tribes who already had put out their eggplants, cauliflowers, tomatoes, and other produce in baskets on the well-trod dirt.  These tiny women wore their fortunes on their bodies, starting with two large twisted aluminum rings around their necks and two huge brass earrings.  Their shaved heads were entirely covered with many coiled strands of small beads until they seemed to be wearing colorful, close-fitting hats.  

​              They used to be entirely naked except for their ornaments, but now they wore pieces of cloth called lungis wrapped around their hips and sometimes short capes to protect their backs from both sun and jungle.  Their almost naked flat chests were more or less covered with many strands of beads, often enhanced with bits of glass and small seashells, that reached below their waists.  Bracelets of multicolored beads covered their skinny arms and decorated their ankles.  They carried whatever they intended to sell in bundles on top of their bead-wrapped heads.  We also saw women wearing large brass nose rings.  None looked like the tribal women we'd seen elsewhere.  Very few men from any tribe were visible. 
              "Probably back home drunk on mahua," our guide said.
              This was a fermented drink made from a local tree, although they also brewed beer from rice or palm sap.  As in many tribal societies, the village women did most of the work.              
​             Sherrill shook her head.  This pattern may have been traditional, but that was no reason to approve of it.  
                                                                     Tribal man collecting sap to make
                                                                          an alcoholic drink

​              The home villages of the mountain tribe were spread over a jungle area of more than 15 square kilometers, their total population not more than five or six thousand.  None of these people wanted the outside world to come to them.  We'd been warned that they didn't like cameras in their faces.  Were they happy?  Who could say?  Could they say?  They'd never known anything else, until now.  Maybe that concept wasn't even relevant. 
                                                 *            *            *

​              The priest—or shaman—tucked up his dhoti—a long skirt-like garment, usually white, worn by Indian men—and knelt on a cloth spread over the dirt in front of a low altar he'd pieced together against the hut wall.  We had come to a small Bathra tribe village in another remote corner of West Bengal and, thanks to our local guide, had been invited to witness a spiritual "cleansing," a process that could take a number of forms—some of them, we'd been warned, violent and bloody.  Sherrill chose to wait outside the palm leaf-roofed hut, where almost naked children were playing in the dirt. 
              Shoulders hunched forward, the shaman chanted prayers while burning incense and arranging orange marigolds.  He was trying to communicate with some of the hostile spirits who roamed beyond the material world and enjoyed tormenting human beings.  Behind him, wearing only an orange dhoti, waited the village man he hoped to cleanse of spirits that had "possessed" him.

​              The shaman rested his hand on the naked brown shoulder of his kneeling "patient."  Chanting and sprinkling "sacred rice," the priest began the ritual process of saving the man from whatever demons had invaded his body.  The man began to sway and shake, his head, arms, and legs moving independently, sounds tumbling from his lips in hoarse growls.  With an artful blending of gestures, words, and nonverbal sounds, the shaman/priest guided him into this other sphere until he lost control of his thoughts and actions.  We might have been watching a form of hypnosis or something else, but whatever it was the patient's writhing grew more intense, his babbling louder and wilder.  As his body shook with increasing violence, the beat himself with closed fists and slammed his limbs and head against the earthen floor until another villager had to help restrain him.   
         The shaman chanted louder, scattering more rice grains over the afflicted man, who doubled over, legs twitching, clutching his abdomen.  The shaman and his helper could hardly control the flailing, retching, patient, his legs now doubled back under his writhing body.  He might have vomited blood (as people say sometimes happens) or have bitten his tongue, but blood there was.  Carefully, the shaman straightened the man's twisted, knotted legs and, at last, the man lay flat on the dirt, whimpering.  Slowly, with assistance, he managed to stand.  Whether or not evil spirits had been expelled from him, we had no way of knowing. 
                                                                 *           *           *

​              Our SUV passed scores of men, women, and children hiking in the dirt at the edge of the narrow road, many barefoot, most carrying burdens on their heads, on their way to the Full Moon Harvest Festival.  By this time, we'd spent several days exploring this remote tribal area.  In one village, we'd seen a traveling herb and medicine man spread his wares on a large cloth on the ground, while the villagers eagerly gathered around.  He had remedies for just about any ailment, he claimed, all natural, of course.  

​              When we reached the festival, the crowd had grown to several hundred, pushing between market stalls selling everything from vegetables to freshly made snacks to replicas of tribal and Hindu deities.  Sometimes, a Hindu god and a tribal one had been united—similar to what we'd found in Cuba, where Yoruba gods and Catholic saints had been merged.  Animal figures suggested that the old animist-based religion still lingered in some areas.  Toys, flags, and bright fabrics also had been arranged to tempt a few rupees from the crowd.  We tried not to call attention to ourselves, but people gawked at us and whenever we hesitated gathered around
              "I feel like a moth on a pin under a microscope," Sherrill whispered.  

​              Moving through waves of bright saris and men in white dhotis, we reached a large wide-armed tree worshiped by local people for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years.  Furled banners on long poles leaned against the dark trunk: white for purification, red for perfection, black for knowledge.  Skinny dogs roamed freely, foraging for whatever they could find.

​              Bare-chested priests, dhotis tucked to their waists, took up the banners and, as others beat drums and played horns, marched through the still-growing crowd, between vendor stalls and piles and baskets of produce.  We struggled to stay near each other as we followed, along with hundreds of others.  People stared and crowded against us so that sometimes we could hardly move.  The men with the banners circled through the market, then entered a ceremonial area filled with spectators.  Our group found positions facing the open space.
              As drums beat louder, one of the almost naked priests thrust his banner into a bamboo framework, then, moaning, let himself flow into the rhythm of the drums, rocking his head back and forth, body swaying as he slid into what seemed to be a self-induced trance.  His eyes rolled, his mouth opened and closed, he fell and his body spasmed and convulsed on the hard-packed dirt.  Beating himself with a flail, thrashing his bare back furiously with the many small whips of the flail, he fell to his knees, just a few feet from Sherrill and me.  He seemed to be trying to rid himself of his physical body—or to drive evil spirits from it.  I wondered how much more this thin brown-skinned man could take of this self-exorcism.  Eventually, two other men in dhotis took the flail from him and led him away, despite his writhing and struggling.
              One by one, each of the ten priests hurled himself into a trance that culminated in frantic flailing of his flesh until he was dragged away.  These rituals, we were told, probably came with these tribes to the Indian subcontinent from Africa thousands of years ago.  Would they, I wondered, survive in a changing world?
                                                          *            *            *

​              The next day, we drove to a second Harvest Festival in a village in another corner of Eastern India—one that was surprisingly different from anything we'd already seen.  The market leading into it was smaller, without the carnival atmosphere.  Women sat on the ground with simple displays of vegetables and fruit.  We weaved through the market to a gate into a ceremonial area, where we found a spot near a small band of drums and a curved brass horn about three feet long.  Women usually weren't allowed in, but none of tribal men said anything.  Later, we were told that because the women were foreign and wore trousers nobody thought of them as female. 

​              A scrawny man in a filthy Dhoti staggered in, babbling at the band.  Two village men quickly got rid of him.  The men in these villages made booze from anything that would ferment, especially the sap of a certain palm tree.  The women did most of the day-to-day work, so the men had time for making and drinking their homemade brew.  Women didn't participate in religious ceremonies and rituals—especially this one, which, we discovered, was a coming of age ritual for young males. 

​              About a dozen bare-chest youths in tucked-up dhotis marched into the open space, then sat on the bare ground.  As the musical beat of drums grew louder, they began to sway and move their heads sideways, apparently sliding into trances, their lean brown bodies shaking.  One by one, priests dressed them in special ritual costumes, colorful vests over their torsos, then capes, and finally a squarish multi-colored crown decorated with pieces of mirror was placed on their heads.
              As each youth went deeper into his trance, his body shaking, a priest completely covered his head with a white cloth.  When it was removed, a needle-sharp bone spike now pierced both of his smooth brown cheeks, running through his mouth.  How this was done without us seeing, I don't know, although we were only five or six feet away.  Supposedly, because he was deep in his trance, he felt no pain.  We didn't see any blood, either. He was lifted onto a decorated throne and carried in circles around the ceremonial area. 
              After all of the young men had been transformed and enthroned, they were carried in a procession through the gate, accompanied by the musicians and the rest of us, and through the market, avoiding stray cows, piles of small purple eggplants, green okra fingers, and baskets of tiny red tomatoes.  Now, the village women could see the transformed youths on their dazzling thrones.  

​              I tried to tell myself that the business with the needle-like spikes was fake, but it looked awfully real.  Our guide told us that we were the only foreigners ever to witness this ceremonial entry into the adult world.  A member of our group told Sherrill and me later that she had seen almost the same ritual in Benin, Africa. 
                                                       *              *              *

​              The princess was young and beautiful and welcomed us for tea with English as perfect as Maggie Smith's.  Simultaneously traditional and modern, the India we saw in 2013 was a country of both extreme poverty and new millionaires, most of them from the high-tech boom.  At the same time, some royal families with vast real estate holdings still controlled great wealth that allowed them to live in traditional splendor.  For hundreds of years, the subcontinent was divided into almost countless kingdoms, each ruled by its own monarch.  This huge country was littered with palaces, castles, and fortresses built over the centuries.  The surviving maharajas, princes, and princesses were still respected and deferred to by local people.
              Our clever young guide had arranged for us to visit one of the reigning royal households in Eastern India.  Although India was a democracy, the young unmarried Maharaja of Y still thought of himself as a king.  He was away on royal business, so we were received by his sister, the princess, a poised young woman of twenty-five.  The sprawling white palace, with its columned arcades, wide terraces, arched windows, and ornate architectural details was built early in the 20th century, but designed to look older.  One wing had been turned into a school, other sections also put to new uses.  The entire walled complex had been swallowed by a growing provincial city. 
              The princess strode into the high-ceilinged room wearing a mix of traditional and Indian styles, a smart phone in one hand, greeted us, and urged us to feel "at home."  She told us about her family's colorful and noble history and how hard her brother worked for his people.  Sherrill and I looked at each other, but of course didn't say anything.
              "They love him," she said. "When he sits on his throne in the public audience room downstairs, many come—not because they want favors, but because they want to see their beloved king."  She gazed without irony at each of us.  "They are happy with their lives and everything my brother does for them."

              What he actually did sounded vague, but no doubt the royal family was busy with a variety of good works.  The hills and mountains around the palace and city were home to several ancient tribes that lived much as they had for a thousand and more years.  Even nearer the city, we saw mud bricks being made by hand, rice being threshed by hand, sugar being boiled out of cane in large vats by bare-chested and bare-legged men, and women walking barefoot along roads, huge bundles and heavy pots on their heads.  Change was everywhere, even in Eastern India, but poverty and stifling tradition coexisted with smart phones and hopes for a different future.  

​              Driving again deep into the jungle to another remote village, we watched a ritualistic hunting dance seldom seen by outsiders.  During the month, we came to admire our guide's skill at arranging these events for us—whatever his attitude about seat belts.  The steep, muddy so-called road may have been one reason why no one else ever saw this village.  As we left afterwards, our two cars became so trapped in muck and rocks that we nearly had to spend the night there.  
​                                                            *               *                *

              Finally, we flew to Hyderabad—an historically powerful city, home to regional princes, now including "Cyberbad," India's Silicon Valley.  From here, we continued our explorations, visiting some of the greatest palaces and fortresses we'd seen anywhere in India, but also passing modern high-rise buildings and glossy malls.  The city, with a population then of more than nine million, also was building a much needed elevated metro system. 
              Our Hyderabad hotel required everyone entering the building to pass through an airport security style screening and all vehicles driving onto the grounds were checked for bombs, mirrors even slid beneath each car, truck, or bus.  The new shopping centers and some famous historic sites also required security checks.  This seemed to have become routine after the deadly bombings in Mumbai a few years earlier.  Two weeks after our return from Eastern India, two bombs exploded in Hyderabad, killing sixteen people and wounding scores.  
​               However, the lasting impression of this part of India wasn't only of violence.  We also remembered the mother tiger exhausted from her effort to feed her cubs, colorful harvest festivals, private morning rituals along the streets of Kolkata, students in a village school, and a barefoot man wearing only a ragged dhoti sleeping on the side of a flower-strewn overpass above the Kolkata flower market, a chaos of fading petals for his pillow.
End of Part Two, Eastern India.  
​

​To be continued.... 
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.  

​Sherrill and I visited more than 60 countries and most of the United States during our 52 year marriage.  This is number 77 of a series about our lives and travels, true stories of two people discovering the world, each other, and themselves through five decades of traveling together.  If you scroll down, you'll come to earlier posts in this series.  To start at the beginning of our marriage and travels look at the Archives list in the sidebar and start with May, 2017.  Older posts are a previous series. 

​              "Why?" friends asked Sherrill and me, when we told them that we going to India for the third time.
              The short answer was that India was the most fascinating country we'd ever visited.  It wasn't easy, it could be harsh and upsetting, but it was never boring.  Sherrill and I didn't exactly love it, but we couldn't resist it.  Our first visit was to the northwest part of India, Rajasthan, where many of the famous sites, such as the Taj Mahal, were.  

​              Our second trip focused the extreme south of the subcontinent, which was complex and colorful in a different way.  Now, thanks again to our friend Hala, we were entering a very different realm, the northeast corner of that huge country, where we'd experience the extreme contrasts of Kolkota (Calcutta), India's largest city with its population of more than 16 million then, and remote areas of tiny villages and dense jungles, where the local people had never seen foreigners, especially the part of Eastern India known as West Bengal. 

​              Morning in Kolkata: A man sat on a low stool while another hunkered next to him on the sidewalk, lathering and shaving his face.  A shoeshine man was setting out tins of polish and brushes on a square of cloth and positioning the foot rest for his customers.  A sidewalk barber was giving a squatting customer a haircut, his fingers expertly manipulating the scissors as hair fell to the pavement.  I passed these scenes and others like them as I maneuvered through central Kolkota at nine in the morning.  Half a dozen men in loose loincloths washed themselves with water gushing from a pipe.  Men and women on the way to work and students in uniforms hurried past.  Sidewalk vendors set out newspapers and used books, lottery tickets and cheap jeans.  Shopkeepers with stubby brooms swept in front of their shops, debris piling at the curb. 

​              Not once did I see a Western face, either a tourist or a business person.  No one was shouting or arguing, fighting or acting crazy.  Our hotel was in the old British section of Kolkota, the so-called "White Town," so I didn't see any beggars, only individuals trying to survive.  The capital of British India for 138 years, until the government moved to New Delhi in 1911, Kolkota was a rich stew of human beings and architecture.  As Sherrill and I explored further during our visit, we discovered that, yes, another 6 million people came into  the city every day to work and, yes, 40,000 people did sleep on the streets, and we did see people pawing through trash for whatever they could sell, but the overall impression we got was of determination and energy, not despair.  It was a young population, 50 percent were 25 and younger, hopeful for the future.

​              One reason I was there was a boy called Apu and his creator, the great Indian filmmaker, Satyajit Ray.  At nineteen, I'd spent my entire life in three western states, then one day I took a Greyhound bus from San Jose to Bengal to meet Apu and his family.  In that distant time of no DVDs, VHS tapes, cable TV, personal computers, or internet, only two ways existed to see old or foreign movies: the late show on television or one of the flea trap movie houses found only in big cities.  Two college friends joined me on an expedition to San Francisco's North Beach, where we sat in a cold dark room filled with metal folding chairs to see all three movies of Satyajit Ray's Apu Trilogy—the story of a Bengali boy, his family, and his journey through life.  

​              Several years after that, Sherrill and I saw that other classic Indian film epic, Mother India, with the great Indian actress Nargis as Radha, a village woman who struggled to raise her sons through poverty, disasters caused by both nature and men, and the difficult times India faced after independence, an Indian Gone with the Wind and then some.  It took a few more years, but we finally got to India and even to Kolkata and rural Bengal, to the world of Apu.  


                                                                 Poster for Mother India.
                                                                     starring Nargis

​              Early in 2013, the year we visited Eastern India, the magazine India Today published a cover story about how "angry and disillusioned with the passive ruling establishment" the Indian people were.  They probably had reason to be angry, but we didn't see any demonstration of it.  Kolkata may have been a city in decay, but it also was a city of resilience. 
              We soon realized just how huge the city was.  We drove out to the Maidan, a vast park area near the colossal white Victoria Memorial, which looked more like a palace than a monument.  It was no wonder that Indians who visited it often thought that Queen Victoria was a goddess.  Across town, we visited the enormous central flower market by the Hougli River, a branch of the sacred Ganges in which we saw people at their ritual prayers and baths.  

​              The so-called "Black Town" was the part of the city left by the British for the Indians, now a strange mixture of decaying mansions and slums.  Some of the Indian merchants became very wealthy and built homes to rival any owned by the British.  One of those, built in 1835 by a Bengali merchant, blending neoclassic architecture with traditional Bengali, came to be called the Marble Palace.  Tucked into the crumbling glory of "Black Town" we found one of Mother Teresa's centers for orphaned children.  Nuns showed us through the facility, rooms with many small beds in which the children slept, and school rooms.  This also was the part of the city revealed in the book and movie "City of Joy," based on real people in this section of Kolkata.  

​              Sherrill was not a sentimental person, but she was moved by the small children in their  cribs and in their classrooms.  After all, for many years she was a children's librarian. 
              A "Grey Town" sprawled between the "White Town" and the "Black Town," an area in which we found a Muslim district with several mosques, a Chinese section, synagogues that remained from when a large Jewish community had been there, booksellers, and workshops where religious statues were made.  Although we were in Kolkata several days, we could have spent much more time there, once the second city of the British Empire.  We could have applied to Kolkata what Dr. Johnson said about the first city of the old empire: "When you're tired of London, you're tired of life."  I may never return, but I can imagine myself there again, experiencing the pulse of its life and savoring its mysteries. 

​                                                       *               *              *
              "She is the grandmother of all tigers," Jai told my friend P. and me, as we gazed from the top of our elephant on the gold and black tiger reclining in the tall grass.  Jai, the son of the Lodge manager, and the two of us had ridden with the mahout into the forest near one of the swamps in the Kanha National Park, one of India's foremost wildlife preserves and a sanctuary for the majestic and elusive Bengal tiger.  

​              After we settled in at the camp the first day, we walked into the forest with one of the local guides and Jai.  Along the way, Jai pointed out the massive brown mounds with soaring spires that oddly resembled the Gaudi church Sherrill and I had seen in Barcelona.
              "Termite mounds," the handsome brown-skinned boy explained, in his rather formal Indian English.  "They have rooms inside.  The termites drag in leaves that rot and make soil so mushrooms will grow for them to eat."  Some of the mounds were torn apart by wild boar and other animals seeking a termite dinner.  "Wild boar is the tiger's favorite food," Jai added. 
              Termites—wild boar—tiger: the natural cycle.  
              Early the next morning, we drove in jeeps from our cabins much deeper into the forest.  

​              We heard the tiger, but only glimpsed it once, crossing the road far ahead, pausing to let out a roar, and vanishing into the trees.  "It's a female," the driver/guide told us.  "talking to its cubs in the forest over there."

​              Two days later, we had the opportunity to ride an elephant to seek tigers and other wild animals who usually managed to avoid detection.  
              "I hope you enjoy it" Sherrill told me.  
              None of our friends except P. wanted to ride the elephant, either.  So the two of us and Jai climbed up a ladder to a small wood shelf on the elephant's back, behind the mahout.  Sherrill and I had ridden on an elephant twice before, but in a box on the elephant's back that we entered from a platform.  This felt much more precarious. 
              We passed clusters of monkeys, a grumpy black boar, colorful kingfishers, peacocks, and other birds.  I had no doubt that all around us the forest undulated with astonishing varieties of life.  Then, as the elephant's great feet crunched through the grass and bush, we spied the body of a freshly killed brown swamp deer with an impressive rack of antlers in the grass between slender crocodile-skin trees.  

​              I started to exclaim, but the mahout sitting in front of me put his finger to his lips.
              "Shh!"  He pointed ahead.
              The elephant crunched forward, my legs swinging near the rough-barked trees.  Then we saw the tiger, partially camouflaged in the tall grass, recuperating from the massive effort of bringing down the deer.  Raising her huge head, she glared at us, her striped white, black, and orange face a pattern of disdain and distrust.  We knew that she must be the female tiger we'd spotted from the jeep the day before, communicating to her cubs.  No doubt, the deer was to be a meal for them.  She let out a low growl and slowly lifted her body until she was standing.   Shrugging her powerful shoulders, she stretched her long body and ambled away, escaping our scrutiny, to a spot in the grass a few yards away.  Our mahout gave a command to the elephant, directing it past the tiger, watching us from her new place. 
              Afterwards, I told Sherrill about the experience: elephant ride, deer, tiger, all of it.  It felt very natural, riding the elephant with the boy and our friend and looking down so closely on the dead deer and the exhausted mother tiger, just part of the natural order of things—although a wonderful, exciting adventure
              "I'm glad you did it," Sherrill told me, "and that it all worked out okay.  As long as I didn't have to do it." 

​               A day or so later, we drove into a newly formed state, Chhattisgarh, a section of Eastern India dense with mountains and forests, where many ancient tribes still lived, separate from the rest of India and the world.  We stayed in an old, almost deserted palace, full of antique furniture from different eras, not very clean, rather spooky.  We kept expecting Bella Lugosi to appear in one of the shadowy hallways. 
              Our room, clean or not, was huge, the bathroom, too, with the toilet and shower on a 15 inch high platform.  If a vampire didn't get us, Sherrill and I decided, we'd break our necks in the bathroom.  The lounge, downstairs, was full of dilapidated, moth-eaten stuffed animals, including a pathetic tiger in danger of losing both its head and its tail.  Our host, who may have been a prince down on his luck, sometimes ate with us.  He always looked hung over at breakfast and drunk every other time we saw him.  
                                              Palace Hotel lounge
                                                 with old hunting trophies

​              On the way to the palace, we stopped at an ancient temple.  Local people gathered around, staring at us with undisguised curiosity.  Apparently, they had never seen foreigners.  The next day, in fact, when we were in one of tribal villages, our guide told us that they thought of us as if we were shamans or priests dropped from the heavens, maybe to bless them.  Small children, though, ran away from us crying—because, he said, the only people they'd seen in trousers had come to give them shots.  A few times, to avoid alarming people, we parked our SUVs on the road some distance from the village or market we were going to visit and walked to it. 

Temple caretaker

​              This was an exciting time to visit Eastern India, a period of transition.  Some of the tribes had begun to assimilate together, our guide told us, unintentionally blending their customs.  The government programs and schools were starting to have an influence, too, for better or worse.  Children often were sent to school, he said, just to get the free lunch they were given. 
              "Whether we like it or not," he said.  "The world is changing."  

End of Part One, Eastern India.
 
To be continued....
 
              If you find these posts interesting, why not explore the rest of my website, too? Just click on the buttons at the top of the page and discover where they take you—including a bio, information about my four novels, along with excerpts from them, and several complete short stories.    
              Please pass the posts on to anybody else you think might enjoy them.
​