Rudyard Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” (1889) begins, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”
Where the two fail to meet is the Indian subcontinent. The disjunction between Asia and Europe makes the country endlessly fascinating.
The British considered India to be the jewel in the crown of the empire upon which the sun never set. The experience left its indelible imprint upon the Anglophone world.
India, like Mississippi, is a world unto itself. One is incapable of disengaging after exposure to its attributes.
I underscore the publisher’s reports on his journey, emphasizing that readers should perform due diligence to expand upon his opening:
Heed should be paid to Wyatt’s columns on India. The imitation that is the sincerest form of flattery should compel readers to go.
I went as a student. A college girlfriend spent time there, and her descriptions were so compelling that I was fated to follow.
I wanted to go to China. The youngest of my Jackson first-cousins was in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, and I inquired whether she might like to join me. She indicated that the top destination for Peace Corps volunteers in Asia was Nepal. I ended up trekking in Nepal, twice, and spent a month in India after the first trip.
Memories of India eclipse those of Nepal. I would have returned repeatedly if it were not the opposite side of the earth: 12 time zones away. It has been too long now. The world has changed immeasurably. I learned on an ill-fated summer Sunday in Venice, while attending opera in Verona, that some places are better remembered as they were. (I wrote a second-cousin, observing that I could not imagine our grandparents, on their European tours, looking like the tourists that I observed in Venice: our grandmothers in halter tops, with tattooed roses on their shoulders and a selfie stick, and our grandfathers in shorts, wearing flipflops, pulling roller bags through St. Mark’s Square: No grandparent of that generation left home without wearing a dress or coat-and-tie, respectively.)
My parents were moved by my enthusiasm for India and travelled there, a dozen years later. They were never so mesmerized by any place visited. If there was anywhere that they would have travelled repeatedly, it would have been India. My mother might have acquired a master’s degree in art history in Indian Art. My father would have made medical missions. A product of Madison County, when it was a rural county, rather than suburban Jackson, he was intrigued by the Indian countryside.
I wrote a postcard to my parents, every day, while in India, and photocopied each one, for them to read during their trip. My father commended my remark that the rural India is breathtakingly beautiful.
The spring after my trip, I was in Washington and spent a day with a cousin of my mother and her older daughter. Margaret Lee spoke of being in India as a reporter, after journalism school at Northwestern University, and accompanying a Nepali Prince, who was a friend, to Kathmandu when Nepal remained a closed country. Nepal opened its borders after China invaded Tibet, figuring open borders provided protection against China’s territorial ambitions.
Maya later told me that Margaret Lee became close with Prime Minister Nehru. His daughter — future Prime Minister Indira Ghandi — was jealous of their relationship. The story was subsequently the subject of an article in The New York Times: https://archive.nytimes.com/india.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/in-american-journalists-photographs-rare-glimpse-of-indias-first-prime-minister/
My mother and I regularly discussed our incomparable experiences in India during our al fresco pandemic Sunday suppers. One never forgets the time spent there.
Respect Wyatt as a village elder: What Wyatt shares bears deepest consideration.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider.
