Senseition

My Passage to India

         Over 50 years old, my India origin story stretches the bounds of memoir and appears to cross the frontier into metafiction.  I insist that the core elements remain mostly true even as the details have faded into the mists of memory.

         Join me in the attic of my home in Woodstock.  My wife and I have owned the place for almost a decade.  We are each in need of a Marie Kondo-style reality instructor for our clutter. Practiced procrastinators, we have not put out a help wanted ad.  I recently opened a metal filing cabinet, and found, not mouse droppings, but file folders of bank account and credit card records that predate our occupancy.  I brought then downstairs, ripped them to shreds, cast them into our paper garbage, and emptied them into the maw of the paper garbage collector at the nearby Saugerties transfer station.  I feel like I lost a few pounds.

         On a previous exploration, I uncovered rubber-banded editions of a year or so of India Abroad.   Thanks to the recruitment efforts of Pranay, a Bombay-born Brandeis scholarship student whose career peaked at The New York Times, my friend Jon and I, colleagues on the editorial board of The Justice, the student newspaper morphed into cogs on the mandala wheel that ran India Abroad for over a year.

         Gopal, the Indian-born travel agent who saw India Abroad as a loss leader sideline, found himself as a publisher devoid of editorial staff after a falling out with his journalists.  Enter Pranay, who blended South Asian charm with immigrant hustle.  He cast a line towards Jon and me on Gopal’s behalf, and we took the bait.  We worked out a quickie quid pro quo with Gopal:  he paid us chump change free-lance money but promised us round-trip tickets to India if we stuck it out.

         Jon and I had refined respectable, if amateur, journalistic skills at The Justice.  He had served as the News Editor, and I had a long stint as the Sports Editor.  He could write to meet deadlines and had accumulated sufficient editorial and lay-out skills.  My prose could be more feature-style and, when needed, academic.

         But the hole in the doughnut was India.  What did two Jewish guys from metropolitan New York, an economics major and an American Studies major, know about India?  You guessed right.  Except for a brief trip to Montreal after my college graduation, neither of us had been overseas.   As for our knowledge of India and its neighbors, we embodied “Mu,” the Zen Buddhist sign for emptiness.

         When we accepted Gopal’s deal, Jon was finishing up law school at NYU and I was starting a year of graduate school at The University of Chicago.  Like our predecessors, we had a falling out with Gopal after about a year at the helm. But he delivered on the promised tickets.

         And in March of 1974, a few days after submitting a draft of my master’s thesis to The University of Chicago, I boarded a Pan Am flight one bound for Bombay.  I stayed with Pranay’s parents in his bedroom and soon launched an improbable two-month long world traveler-style odyssey that took me to the southern tip of India as well as Calcutta, New Delhi and Agra.  Unlike many members of my generation, I did not go to India as a devotee of a maharajah or a seeker of mystic truth in an ashram.  But I did forge personal connections and make discoveries that were life changing.

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