Diapers on a Dateline: The Adventures of a United Press Family in India During the 1950s
Pegge Parker Hlavacek
© 2002, 2009 John M. Hlavacek. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Published by Hlucky Books at Smashwords
Omaha, NE 68137
Contents
Foreword by John Hlavacek (circa 2002)
Foreword by Pegge Hlavacek (circa 1962)
2 A Thousand and One Nights in Bombay
3 Mommy, Why Is Everyone So Dark Brown in India?
6 Light Charity Bawl—Sweat, Sniffles, and Small Profits
7 Ceylon—Where Everything Is Green but the Elephants and People
9 We Hold Still for Oil Painting While on the Run Goin’ North
11 A Wee Brown Sparrow Is Good Luck in the Delivery Room?
13 Happy Birthday—Pony Rides in Monsoon Rain
14 I Was Dreaming of a Snow-White Christmas
15 Kiss and Tell to the Book-of-the-Month Club
18 Be My Guest, the Man Said—the Nehru Man
22 Headhunters I Have Known Too Well
23 Tenzing—In the Life of Every Man, a Mountain
Foreword by John Hlavacek (circa 2002)
In the autumn of 1951, as the United Press bureau chief for India and Pakistan, I attended a meeting of Pakistan newspaper editors in Lahore. Also attending the meeting was Mrs. Margaret (Pegge) Mackiernan, the Vice Consul for Public Affairs at the American Consulate. As the two of us were the only foreigners at the meeting, she invited me to tea and I invited her for dinner. I then learned that she was a widowed mother of twins and that her first husband, Douglas S. Mackiernan, had been a CIA agent who was killed by Tibetan border guards as he and his party were escaping from northwest China ahead of the Communist takeover in 1950. As consolation for her loss, the State Department offered her the post of a vice consul, the cover that her husband had used as a vice consul in Tihwah, China.
Pegge came by her press credentials honestly. As Margaret Lyons, she began her newspaper career at age 19 at the Harrisburg Patriot News, writing an advice column for teenagers (an early Ann Landers). And she took a pen name: Pegge (with an e) Parker (because everyone knew about Parker pens). Soon she took her clippings to the Washington Times Herald, where she became the women’s page editor and a favorite of Eleanor (“Cissie”) Patterson, the publisher. It was wartime, and Pegge covered the training of servicemen—clips of the time show her marching with troops, flying in airplanes for parachute drops, and riding tanks. Her newspaper stories were featured in the Herald, and as a result she became a Camel Cigarette poster girl, even though she was not a smoker (and never became one).
With the war still on, in 1945 she left Washington to be sole reporter on the Fairbanks Daily News Miner. Fairbanks was a hub for the transfer of wartime planes and supplies to the Soviet Union, and Pegge was there to report on the celebrities who traveled through Fairbanks on their way to the Soviet Union. Among them were author Lillian Hellman and champion boxer Joe Louis. Then she wrote a story for Reader’s Digest on Alaska’s Ice Pool. Her check was so large that she quit her job in 1946 and sailed to Shanghai, China. She soon found a job with the military, and with her adventurous nature, she traveled to Saigon, to Manchuria, and to northwest China where she met and later married her first husband. Their twins were born in Shanghai in September of 1948, and she and the twins were evacuated six weeks later on a Pan American flight just ahead of the entry of the Chinese Communists into Shanghai. Her husband returned to his post at Tihwah, and she never saw him again. (For those who would like to know more about that part of her life, there are two books that detail Douglas Mackiernan’s life: The Book of Honor by Ted Gup, and Into Tibet by Thomas Laird.)
Pegge Mackiernan at her desk, working as a vice consul in Pakistan.
***
Our romance was rocky. I went back to my headquarters in Bombay, and Pegge soon was transferred to the American Embassy in Karachi, which was part of my United Press territory. Whenever I was in Karachi, we would meet. We met again in the spring of 1952, when Pegge and a friend came through Bombay on a trip to Goa, which was then a Portuguese colony on an island off the west coast of India. On her return trip through Bombay, she was delayed for a few days because her plane reservations were cancelled, and we had time to get to know one another better.
A few months later, in October of 1952, Pegge came to Bombay to marry John Hlavacek. The story that follows is her recording of our first five years of marriage. She called it Diapers on a Dateline, and she first wrote these words in 1960, when the book should have been published. I rediscovered the manuscript while cleaning out our home for a possible move. With the help of Janet Tilden, a fellow Carleton graduate, I decided to publish our story for our children and grandchildren as well as readers who would like to know about an American newspaper family in India in the 1950s.
-John Hlavacek
Omaha, Nebraska
September 2002
Pegge and John on their wedding day.
Foreword by Pegge Hlavacek (circa 1962)
In that tall, tall tower at Radio City that decks the clouds and cricks the neck—the RCA Building—there is, upon the fifth floor, the NBC Newsroom.
Everything on this newsy fifth floor is in hot, live production. Each telephone, typewriter, and teletype quivers with news. Even the paper clips jump! The main news desk is like a captain’s roundtable hung with sidearms of telephones. From the ceilings hang double TV screens that run, without voice, all day and all night, dogwatching CBS, dogchecking NBC.
Some of the most attractive, best-tailored men I have ever seen through a drift of late five o’clock cigarette smoke rush past with cables, scripts, and stopwatches.
Chet Huntley, whose home office is on this high-charged fifth floor, walks past shuffling a full hand of mail. He studies every fan letter intently, as though he were reading the handwriting on a check.
News and noise…names and overseas operators calling, calling…And outside the black-walled fifth-floor elevators, hundreds of tourists on Guided Tours…
It was here on this fantastic fifth floor at NBC that I did the final typing of this manuscript. I sat at a desk and typewriter that were away on summer vacation, so to speak.
I had originally found my way into this jumping newsroom because the wonderful Guy of this book, Husband and Father of Five, John Hlavacek, is now a roving cameraman-correspondent in the Caribbean for NBC. As I wrote in New York he was roving in Costa Rica.
How I ever got a chapter finished or spelled words from dictionaries marked “Special Commentators—Do Not Remove,” I do not know. Deep as I was in kiddie copy, I was far from immune to the whirling world around me. Such a summer it was for news!
Not only the Olympics in Rome and the presidential campaigns but the Belgian Congo…Castro in Harlem…Krushchev a bully boy…Hurricane Donna…Birds causing plane crash in Boston…the sad passing of Oscar Hammerstein…
Diapers had hard going through all of this. But even though the excitement kept me listening hard to one thing while writing another, I must give warm thanks to NBC for letting me hum on its lovely typewriters and for letting me crib all the paper on which Diapers was written…
***
The greatest mystery of the East was about my husband’s job. I was constantly explaining that although John was a Foreign Correspondent, he wasn’t “with” any newspaper. He was the bureau chief of a worldwide news agency called a wire service. No, not Western Union. The wire service was called United Press. There was scarcely a newspaper one could pick up anywhere in the world in whatever language that did not have a UP story in it somewhere.
This was all very well but not completely clear. “Thought you said, dear, your husband had been writing for newspapers in India and Pakistan and All Over for—heavens!—eleven years? Yet he’s not a newspaper man, but a wire service man?” Mystery solid as sandalwood.
What, exactly, is a wire service? I am surprised how many people simply do not know. A wire service is like a chain of newspaper offices called “bureaus” in all the key newsmaking centers of the world. Newspapermen and photographers who work out of these bureaus send their news stories and what they call PIX by cable, fastest airmail, or airfreight to leading communication cities like London, New York, Tokyo, and San Francisco, where incoming news is put out on “wires” (teletypes), feeding a direct pipeline to newspapers and radio stations around the world. The same (wire) story goes to the same newspaper-radio-TV newsrooms at the same time. This is a “service”—a wire service!
Newspapers naturally pay good money to get news within minutes or hours of actual events in faraway places like New Delhi. And this paid our Keep, justified our having a “news bureau” there.
I have explained all this a hundred times over, but the really very curious will press on down to my trade talk: “What’s a dateline?”
A dateline tells exactly where a news story originates, where it is On Location, and exactly what day it happened. Glance at any newspaper: a pleat-folded commuter’s Times, yesterday afternoon’s with the grocery specials marked, last Sunday’s scattered like blotter paper over the Just Done, Still Damp kitchen floor. Note that little bit at the beginning of a news item that looks like this:
Sweet Wine, Iran (UPI) May 1—Sheraz White
Label is great… or Moscow (UPI) Dec. 25—Yes, we have no
Christmas today…
The “dateline” is the bit before Sheraz and Santa Claus. You may never have “seen” a dateline before. All that is changed. Now you know.
Incidentally, although John’s wire service has for years been called simply UP, it has now merged with an “I” and is, strictly speaking, a tongueroll called “United Press International.”
The notion of hanging diapers for five (three boys, two girls, including a set of boy-girl twins) on anything so airy and other-purposed as a dateline is just to give you an idea of Time, Place, and Condition. Which is all a dateline can do for you—even in The New York Times!
In this story five children and I viewed an incredible world over the rims of the cribs. I would say the Asian world outside was often kin to the kiddie world at home. For things on the Outside were no more predictable, smooth-running, reasonable, fair-shared, or geared to peace and quiet than they were behind my closed doors at home.
As a family in India we have all come quite a way, survived and bounced. We are by no means unique or so unusual. There are today thousands of Americans—Average Ones, Ugly Ones, Terribly Nice and Sincere-to-Tears Ones, Boiled Water Ones, Technically Expert Ones, Dedicated Ones, Fat Ones, and Government Ones—living a family life of curious adaptations, turns and twists, all over Asia.
All of us, I feel, receive much more than we give.
***
I have come to look upon India not as a country, but as an Experience. As the children’s life in India is the essence, the total raison d’être (just try spelling that one quick! Where was I? Oh yes…), this book is a purely lighthearted family story. I have only briefly skimmed events in which the children took no part. The vast profundities of this Great Country I leave to others.
India itself is a family story in many ways. A very big, very sensitive family story with all its triumphs, tragedies, its religions and passionate divisions self-contained. Like any family, it looks with annoyance and resistance upon meddlers who would interfere by offering Good Advice. As a Family, India demands to Straighten Things Out Her Own Way—she can and will—and must, to survive. But it will take time, more time probably than this nervous, jetty, pressurized age will allow.
I do not intend to be flippant or to make a joke of India with all my skitterish nonsense here. For there is no amusement in the heart of India.
Let us clearly say that this is not a story of India at all, but of a family’s experiences there. The diapers on the family line are fresh and bright, and laughter is our talcum.
1 A Honeymoon with Twins?
I must begin at the beginning. With a dateline—
BOMBAY, India—(UP)—October, earlyish, in 1952. I said yes, but I was so weepy and sniffly and choked up that I thought he hadn’t heard me. “Yes,” I said again, “if you think we could work things out—”
“Work things out!” declared John. “We’ll sure as hell work things out! We’ll get married right here and take the twins on the honeymoon!”
John stretched a big hand across the coffee table. “Darling, don’t cry. We’ll go straight home to Boston, get the kids, and have our honeymoon on the way back. What better way to tie up a new family? The twins’ll love Switzerland—bus rides in Rome—maybe Paris, but no art galleries— maybe Venice, yeah, better idea, think of the kids in the gondolas.”
I thought of the children, my heart moved to profound areas John did not yet share. I looked down at my left hand, which already wore a plain gold wedding ring…
Doug—husband of First Love and First Marriage and father of my twins—had been killed, oddly, in Tibet only a few years before. The Dalai Lama, himself a homeless exile now, had given formal permission to Doug and his party to enter the forbidden wilderness of Tibet. Yet there had been an accident…Most Regrettable…A border guard had fired first, robbed second, inquired third, been arrested and lashed fourth. Doug was not quite an accepted memory to me yet, for death, I found, was a powerful force binding me to every association and related event in and around China, Tibet, and India…which was why I had come back and why the small children had been left, temporarily, with grandparents in safer Boston.
Then along had come John Hlavacek—huge, six-footer, homely, noisy, thirty-odd, a bachelor newspaperman, by nature and condition a Most Happy Fellow. He had knocked around the Far East for most of his adult years, thriving on it.
John had grown up in Chicago, graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota and gone straight to China to teach school at a university in the interior. Speaking fluent Chinese, he had stayed on during the war, had worked for the military attaché in Chungking, had driven medical supplies over the Burma Road, and eventually had become a correspondent for the United Press. His cub days were spent in Chungking. After that, Bombay had become his working headquarters. He had been in India about six years when I first met him.
He was completely unlike any old India hand I had ever known. He was relaxed and full of good humor: no tensions, no strong arguments or convictions, no complexes, no ties. A rare tonic who talked baseball instead of the rising threat of communism or the rising cost of bridal dowries. He had lived on a roller coaster ride with his job and himself. He even caught the brass ring when he really reached for it.
“Lucky Hlavacek, they call me!” He laughed off everything. I had never known anyone with quite his breezy, unscuffed, and unhurt personality. “Life,” he would say, “is too short to close any windows or any doors or to miss anything. I’ve seen the rise and fall of many a ‘great man,’ weathered many a shaking climax, now forgotten, here and in China. Now I take things easy. I don’t get involved, or all worked up. I guess like the Chinese, I’m practical. What is, is. You’ve got to live with it that way. OK. Why not make the most of what’s available? That’s why I like pretty girls and baseball and golf after five. I detest writing, but I love working on a good story and filing by cable. I’ve seen some rough stuff here during the Partition, the riots were something I’d never like to live through again…I’ve covered Gandhi’s marches and demonstrations, and in the end, his assassination…I guess I’ll never forget Mountbatten making his most famous press statement—announcing the partition of India. I was here for the first Independence Day…You can see India’s my hometown…I’m crazy about elephants and tigers, but I don’t want to shoot them…I’m damned fond of Indians and get along with them. Everyone knows Hlavacek everywhere I go, and I like it that way. I’m not wild about curry, never was. Indian culture either. Their religion they can have, and that’s the way they like it. I don’t speak Hindi, but neither do they, at least not the majority of Indians who make the news. Not even Nehru speaks what you’d call good Hindi, and he only started speaking an Indian tongue publicly in the last few years. I don’t know…where we differ I don’t push or argue with Indians. I don’t try to save them, change them, convince them, win them, or make USA flag-wavers out of them. I take them As Is, the Unchanging in the Changing East…They’re wonderful on one hand, obnoxious and infuriating and ornery on the other. So’m I. Better think twice about me, woman!”
Thinking twice always brought us back to the twins. From the beginning, the children had never been far from John’s anticipations.
“Two down and ten to go,” he would say by way of a mad excursion into romantic realms. Bachelor enthusiasm for children I would normally discount, but in addition to everything else, John had a particularly rare gift with handling children. Wherever we went, he was a Pied Piper—kids came running, popping out of doors and windows, up from carpets, out of tubs and playpens to be made into hand-and-heel airplanes, to ride the bear, to make monkeyshines with sofa pillows, to swim without tubes or watchful mothers at swimming pools. He carried no bubble gum or lollipops; he simply played with the kids, caught them in his arms as they came running. “Women run from me, but innocent kids eat me alive—see?” His joking words were true. He was particularly a roaring clown of fun and tricks to Indian children, but he thought nothing of swatting a Mother’s Darling hard if the fun got out of line.
I guess I really made up my mind about John not in a moonlit and jasmine-hung garden but sitting alone watching him by a swimming pool. Whenever he arrived at the Willington Club pool in Bombay, the children’s hour began. Adults crawled out, and John and the kids took over. I watched this big, kind kid-coach (and sometimes newspaper man) give crickety small strappers the confidence of lions. The wary and toe-dipping timid ones soon learned that they could make the (deep) grade, too. The trick was just to kick hard and often. John loved the pool school as much as the kids. He took the green chlorine-scented testing ground seriously. Said he, “Look, if a youngster learns coordination and self-control, how to handle himself out there alone on his own in deep water—how to compete fairly with others and just to swim well, with nice, clean, even strokes—he’s over his first hurdles and on his way.”
With such romantic endeavors was our love affair sealed, but I could never say I had any mistaken notions about the pace of things to come.
***
I had not met John originally in India. It was in Lahore—treesy, fascinating old city with a past—where a small conference of Pakistani editors and publishers had been taking place. John had come in from India, as Pakistan was part of his United Press territory. I was attending the conference officially.
At that time I was a vice consul at the American Consulate General. When Doug, who was in foreign service (State Department) had been killed, I had been given (in a sense) his commission. My first post had been by choice close to the mountains, to the North, the Himalayas and Kharakorums which Doug himself had crossed fleeing into Tibet from his Consulate post in China when the Communists has made their sweeping breakthrough. And, too, these mountains bordered the passes that led into the high Asian fantasy world of Chinese Turkestan, known as Sinkiang, where I had first known Doug. The heart has its reasons…and I had gone gladly to be even remotely somewhere “near” the mountains that bordered and crossed over into Tibet.
I had intended to be overseas for no longer than a year. For one thing, I had little money. My husband’s complicated estate was not to be settled for a long time. I felt I could save quickly what home-starting funds would be needed to establish the difficult household of a fatherless family in which very young children must be left in the care of a housekeeper while Mama Goes Out to Provide.
Saying goodbye had been so well planned beforehand, but the moment in Boston had been full of anguish. Even at the age of two, children know—by electric current?—when something is in the air. Near-panic seized Mary, straight-brown-haired, brown-eyed, a nutmeg bundle, as I bent to kiss her goodbye with more than casual tenderness. Her extreme opposite, twin brother Mike—so blond, blue-eyed, high-strung, sensitive and screamy—immediately caught the signal. Both began to cry, “Mommy, Mommy!” “For heaven’s sake, go—go—go quickly and don’t drag this out,” put in Doug’s stoic Bostonian mother, who had readily agreed long before to care for the children until my return. Emotions are out of order in Boston, and especially scenes in public. Grandma’s voice betrayed her own strain when she said, “We’ll take them over to the park to see the swans immediately. Don’t worry, they will cheer up once you are out of sight.”
I fled, running to the train that was taking me back to New York, but the moment had been as dreadful for me as the memory of that news on the telephone months before.
There is no therapy like attending to the compelling needs of others. To work because you must work, not just going through the motions, but to work with all your powers in a job that calls for all your experience and resources. I was young, chin-set, tense, and earnest. I had been a newspaperwoman, so it was a logical step to make me a press officer first at the upcountry consulate, then at the Embassy in Karachi.
At the conference where I first set eyes on John, there was only one other woman, and she, editor of an obscure ladies’ publication, was heavily shrouded in a black Moslem burka that did not expose even the tip of her nose or the toe of her shoe. I was easily the belle of the ball with my crossed legs showing and my whole, entire face exposed to men!
The burka, orthodox but stubbornly persistent, is unhealthy and unwholesome; it has to be seen to be believed and understood. This black cotton tent completely cloaks (“veils” is hardly the word!) a woman’s face and form. It is her Duster when she goes outside her home for whatever errand. Sometimes it serves a mercy, purpose—In old times, and more recent days, women were driven to this extreme protection to keep them from being abducted or insulted, or worse, upon the streets. In time, the burka became intermeshed with religion, custom, and the powerful male predilection to keep women under control. My heart really abandoned hope for the younger generation when I used to see the black-burka’ed college girls in Lahore passing across the campus, books in their arms.
When I was a newcomer to the “modern” Moslem world, I took at face value the fine words of modern reform that said burkas were all but illegal and outlawed. But face value became black burka face value, and when I had been in Pakistan longer, I sadly observed too often the mentality that went with the burka. I do not exclude those lovely, dazzling, jeweled and mascara’ed ladies who “represent” Pakistan at fine-feather receptions and parties abroad. I have seen these fetching ladies step from an airplane in their native land, donning a tent burka from head to heel before allowing relatives to “see” them. I fear I am somewhat disenchanted with Fine Ladies Who Serve the Cause as far, far away from the Cause as they can get and their husband’s lucky job will take—and keep—them.
Anyway, at this fateful conference a Pakistani editor, whose intelligence and good humor I had always enjoyed, brought over the Big American to be introduced. His name was unpronounceable. Also unspellable. It was American, I learned—imported, generations ago, from Prague to Chicago.
“Lav-a-check…simple,” he had breezily repeated his name, “translates into ‘little head,’ so how can you forget it? Uh…say—see you later, maybe? Dinner or something?”
Coolly polite to Little Head, I responded, “Why not come to my place on the Lower Mall for lunch tomorrow? I’ve got a good cook—drop by about one? I’ll be very much interested in hearing about India.”
I was not being coy. John’s lunch visit was intended to be strictly business. Gathering information, especially of political value, was part of any vice consul’s job. In fact, I put the cost of John’s lunch (and martinis) on my official expense account and afterward wrote up an informal memo of his conversation. That’s what official lunches are for. Memoranda of Conversation.
The lunch for John, however, became in the end a big argument. First, he became quite curious about my absentee motherhood. He had seen the picture of the twins on my table. He hung onto the leather folder, gazing warmly at their bright faces…Then he was quite brutal to me. “You mean you left these two little kids behind and came out here to do anti-communist missionary work? You’re crazy! How could you really give a damn about US-Pak relations, high, low, or middlin’, with twins on your apron strings? What the devil are you doing in Lahore, anyway? No damn place for a woman! No damn place for a young, foreign woman alone, anyway!”
All of this hit me broadside and was very upsetting. I was torn between feeling raw, indignant anger at what was Not His Business, and being touched by his obviously sincere concern for the children. The unasked-for Appraisal of my Motherhood, however, almost drove me to ask him to leave. One thing saved Big John Little Head—I knew he had been carried away by a situation that filled his bachelor consciousness with honest consternation. “Look,” he begged me, “either get these two kids out here or go home to them. There is no good reason you can give me which justifies leaving two-year-olds with grandparents thousands of miles away. They’re all you’ve got—don’t lose them, Pegge!”
How could I be angry with him for long? He was putting into Dutch Uncle words what I knew in my own heart. From this jolting first encounter, I knew John Lav-a-check had stuck a very deep pin in me…
He was to pay dearly for it. For his unsolicited advice, the lunch cost him his freedom and exactly $64.73 cold cash.
A year or so later, a letter reached me in Bombay from my senior officer at the Consulate. Three of us in Lahore had shared a co-existence built around the best cook who ever raised his hand near a stove. My senior regretted to inform me (by then, Mrs. Hlavacek) that a check for my share of the kitchen costs when I lived in the Lahore compound had been lost in the mail. Would I please write out another at once, in the amount of $64.73?
John wrote out the check with a faint laugh—“What the hell is he charging me the extra three cents for?”
“Just what your meddling in My Affairs was worth, Sweetheart,” I replied.
***
If a girl can manage it some way, somehow, someday, some man—she should be married in India, and especially in Bombay. The setting is magic by the sea. John and I plighted troth with trimmings: in deference to my Irish (why call it Roman?) Catholicism, we went through it all in a little Catholic University chapel, making me—John said, beaming—a college bride.
We had a champagne breakfast, which in a city choked dry with Prohibition, was a vast, ingenious triumph. We had a rooftop reception by night, when I met in a millstream mass all of the friends who had known John as a Bachelor Forever. Gifts brought by Indian friends to the gasping bride included incredible wedding saris (really dowry saris) spun of pure gold and silver thread. I have them locked away in the bank vault with the children’s birth certificates. No one in India would dream of giving a toaster or coffee pot or iron or electric mixer as a wedding present. Beautiful and duplicated gifts (cigarette boxes, serving trays) of silver come instead. With servants to polish everything, this is fine. One elderly Indian friend who came to the reception in a Gandhi cap, white fitted coat, and dhoti brought us a replica of the Taj Mahal in plastic with an electric light bulb underneath! No home is complete without one! We also got two other models of the Taj—one in bone ivory, and one in silver.
We departed shortly afterward for Europe, having decided we had better get Mama and Papa organized as a Family before we added the sauce of twins. Italy in late October and early November isn’t supposed to be crisply golden, cool, extended summer—but that year it was. Oh, to see Capri out of season when you are there to Behold all alone your hillside to the sea! Generally speaking, to honeymoon in Italy in any season is to take up the knife, fork, spoon, and goblet as Never, Never before. You might as well take up a new spouse, new love, new bondage as well. We did.
When I had first become engaged to John, he had promised me a beautiful gem from Ceylon, or a sapphire from India, rubies even, or emeralds. Name your choice. I did—a dress from Dior instead. So upon this honeymoon, with the cooperation of the Paris bureau of UP, entrée was secured to a salon showing when the Master himself was still on hand.
Pegge and John on their honeymoon in Rome.
Ahhh…It was the year before the fashions became desperate to go somewhere, up or down, in or out. The clothes were simply beautiful, just that, sleeves were sleeves, hems came to here, bosoms belonged. Such textiles and colors and fabrics! But as I viewed them, I knew that what was rapture to the eye was exodus to the dry cleaning back home in India. As les models swished by, I thought, “Fancy ironing that little number…think of the mildew during monsoon…think of the too-close proximity of social life in Bombay, where something too dazzling is too well remembered.” I saw my engagement ring dress slipping away from me. I leaned toward John to murmur, “A sapphire will do.” He did not hear me. He did not see me. He did not know me. His wife! Although Paris fashion models are not the beauties one would imagine they should be, that year’s promenade comprised the most gorgeous, flawlessly coiffed, made-up, and dressed females that ever swung hip or heel…Even I was carried away! Especially unforgettable was the tall French-Chinese model who appeared in costume after costume in one color only: Dior blue. Her furs were naturale, her grace and swish and Chinese eyes were a Presence seen first in Dior’s imagination and then made real. A sewing machine and a few yards of cloth, sky blue—stuff of genius?
When we left the salon, I had bought only perfume, but I could hardly hope to look Dior simply because I smelled Dior, I thought depressingly. I went meekly to dinner afterward, eating veal cutlets with wine sauce in profound silence, thinking my thoughts. It was unfair, destructive, a gross miscalculation and fatal error: I had walked into Chez Dior ecstatic, on springy heels, a bride out to buy her Just Desserts, to snap crisp fingers and say, “That one!”
The results had been shattering. It wasn’t just the dry cleaning. I just wasn’t up to swinging 12 yards of taffeta bustle, and India was too hot for a beautiful wool suit. And, oh, those models!
At this point, Bridegroom John, cheeks walnut-wadded with good cheese and biscuits, had the misfortune to remark, “Boy, I must have been in the bush too long—but those Dior dolls—that blonde dragging her chinchilla on the carpets and that Chinese number—”
I answered him not a word.
“Did you,” John tried again, “see anything you wanted to buy?”
I muttered something through gritted teeth.
With a sigh of relief like exhaust from a jet engine, John cut heavily into more bleu cheese and said something like “Have it your way.” We finished our last Paris honeymoon meal in silence broken only by the swilling of black coffee.
I have never set foot in Paris since.
***
All roads led eventually to Boston and the children, although not as we had planned originally. John wanted to come with me, but he had to go back: the bureau was unattended, and he had been gone a month, he had shaken up his boss in Tokyo quite considerably by even taking a honeymoon completely outside his working territory, going off to expensive cable places like Rome and Paris.
I arrived in Boston with feelings of joy and constraint. It was not easy to take the children away from my former mother-in-law and her husband, Doug’s father, to a new Daddy half-the-globe-away. They would “never” see the children again, they felt, with understandable unhappiness. My reunion with the children took place in early December when all Boston was holly-hung and carolsome for Christmas. What painful irony, for the children were to spend their first Christmas in India with John and me.
The gentle and sad Boston grandparents, however, carried off the awkward situation with good grace, with a far better outward show of harmony and encouraging bon voyage for the children than I could manage.
I had not been prepared for the changes wrought by absence and the rapid growth and development of young children. I had been gone about a year and a half, all told, but I found myself a stranger to the twins. When I entered the room, Grammy said in a forced, cheery voice that took all her command: “Here is Mommy, children! Oh, they have been so excited waiting for you. What questions they asked about you! Especially what did you look like? Somehow snapshots meant nothing to them. They couldn’t ‘see’ you—”
Absence from children for whatever reason—father away during wartime, mother off to work or have a career—explain it, justify it, but face it: absence creates a gap, a deep valley, the belonging hold is no longer there. To recover it, the absenteeism must be undone, slow step by slow step, with constant reassurances, day by day, that you will never, ever Go Away again.
Psychologists and separated families must know only too well the price of absence. I could not have imagined that my going when the children were only two, unable to grasp much beyond their daily needs, would make such a great difference.
When I swept into the room, arms wide to smother them, they ran away. Then they would come back, like forest Bambi’s, peeking around the corner of the living room to stare at me. When they caught my eye, they bolted again. It was several hours later before the strange lady called Mommy was able to take their hands and kiss those rosy, moon-round little faces. Mike had just learned how to say “scissors”—he kept saying it for me, over and over again, as I patted his blond head and praised his clear speech.
Not only had they grown up, but they had learned new things in their little growings that I had not shared. How to count. How to feed toast crumbs to a tame little fat squirrel. How to sled down the hill in winter! Mike could tell time with amazing accuracy, even to five minutes past. I had not coped with their bout of measels, bed wettings, thumb sucking, trips to the doctor, shots that really hurt like bee stings…nor, on the sunny side, had I shared their first circus (they were frightened of the lions—came home screaming). Mike’s first $2.00 haircut! Mary’s terror of the Walt Disney witch in Snow White. I had missed birthdays and one whole Christmas at home with them. Why, the lady called Mommy didn’t even know their dog or Dingy, the sly, silken Siamese puss.
I gradually progressed from a kind of auntie to something closer. The toys that I had brought from India fascinated them too briefly. After all, Indian toys are made of fragile materials and are more for Looking At than running over the floor and losing behind the kitchen sink. I fared better telling stories, invented one by one, to intrigue them with the idea of going to India on a big, big airplane…
That did it—the plane ride and all it entailed—eating dinner from a tray—sleeping “all night” up in the sky. The fact that the three of us were going, just the three of us, helped knit a “we” snugness around us, helped touch off an instinct to reach for Mommy’s hand more and more often.
***
We flew overnight to Paris a few days before Christmas. From there to Italy…Egypt…Saudi Arabia—the long, long way to Bombay. On the trip, the final link in dependence on me became secure. Mommy was no auntie, and Mommy had authority and correction as well as hugs and Drinks of Wadder.
In Rome, ears were popping from various altitude changes. Mike was sleepy and howling. While I sent a cable to John confirming our arrival time, Mary slipped from my notice and got lost in the terminal. She began to cry, and was immediately surrounded by anxious Italians clucking solicitude in two or three alternate languages. She screamed louder, and I found her. In Cairo at about three in the morning, we were so numb with exhaustion we did not even get off the plane, just let the insecticides flow over us. The stop in hot Saudi Arabia yielded one glimpse of a camel for an excited Mary.
Finally, the last lap—Bombay in a few hours. Now, I told myself, I must get the children prepared for Daddy John.
I roused myself, woolly-eyed and dogbeat from nonstop-over-anight’s-sleep. Mary cast big, blinking eyes my way. Mike was stretched flat out over two seats. I took Mary on my lap, brushing her hair gently with my fingers.
“Darling…do you know…someone very wonderful will give us all a big bear hug when we get off in Bombay,” I told her.
Mary turned up a face like a tea-party cup—pour in nice, warm words, Mommy, I’m so-o-o tired. “Who will give us a bear hug?”
“Why…why, Daddy John.” I felt suddenly inadequate. “Your new Daddy who is waiting for us. We are all going to live in a new home with him.”
Mary liked the idea. “He’s waiting for us, right now, down on the ground?”
I kissed the tip of her button nose. “Yes, darling, he’s waiting…he’s been waiting for you and Mike ever since the day he first knew about you.”
What truth one can share with a child. How clearly true the words seemed to me. John had really married me for the children he’d always wanted. The twins had made him doubly eager…Mary’s head fell to my shoulder, kitten-weight, as sleep claimed her. Oh, Daddy John, I thought, how we all need you waiting down there on the ground—how all three of us need you—and aren’t we lucky you need all of us, too?
2 A Thousand and One Nights in Bombay
We flew in under the stars, landing at Santa Cruz airport near the sea. I had not seen John for a month. We would never be Two again; we were a Family of Four before I had even been carried over a threshold.
The twins’ first touch with India began in the most unlikely place to remember with love: Indian Customs. Never before revered in print, it was here that Daddy John was compelled to carry them and set them down on the ground for the first time. He had been permitted to waive all restrictions and rush out onboard the plane the minute the propellers stopped turning.
John welcomes Pegge and twins Mary and Mike upon their arrival in Bombay.
“Hi, Mike ’n’ Ike!” he had roared, scooping up his kids in one giant grab, bussing and bouncing them, one on each shoulder. Mary remained “Ike” to him from that moment, and amused Indians must have thought Americans sometimes named little girls after presidents.
Mike, woolly, rumpled, and sleepy, gazed about the Santa Cruz airport enclosure with its worn luggage counters, its milling adults, its Indian officials in starched, white, white uniforms. Mommy and the Big Man were heavily preoccupied with passports, yellow health booklets, declaration forms…
Mike stepped up to the first Customs man.
“Hey—zis India?” he inquired.
“Why, yes, son. Bombay.” The Customs man peered down from a great height.
“Oh. You a Indian?”
“Indeed I am.”
“Oh. We got Indians in ’Merica, too.”
Smiling. “So I hear.”
“Got any cowboys here?”
“No, son. Only in the movies.”
“We’re here for Christmas. You got a Santa Claus here?”
Indian Customs reassured Mike that very good little boys were found by Santa Claus even in far-off India. Set straight from the start, Mike mumbled, “OK—thanks,” sliding his thumb back into his mouth. India wouldn’t be bad, maybe.
Then came the ordeal of all the baggage, bulging beyond capacity with already-wrapped Christmas presents. I knew there were strict Customs limitations on toys—perhaps only one per passenger—yet here we were, loaded with them.
“All these bags yours?” Mike’s Customs friend ran a professional eye up and down the scale of my lumpy lot. “What are you carrying besides clothing?”
Our eyes met. Trapped, too red-handed to tell anything but the Duty-ful truth, I spelled “t–o–y–s…”
With a charming smile and in complete dereliction of duty, the Customs Man chalked every bag, tousled Mike’s blond head, and we hustled speechless out of Customs in five minutes.
We headed home through the bright city streets, along glittering Marine Drive…past odd-looking humped bundles on the sidewalk I recognized as sleeping human beings. The night sea breeze in December is Bombay’s best: cool, tangy. Mary sat banjo-eyed, wordless, numb for sleep. Mike, however, quickly piped up with “Hey—driver’s on the wrong side of the car—and hey!—look where the steering wheel is!”
John beamed as he explained that Wrong Sides are British Sides and an old habit in India. Smart kid, notices everything, he winked to me, but we gotta get that thumb sucking licked, hmm?
We moved rapidly out of the downtown area of Bombay and turned along the sea, into the heart of the cliff-hung Apartments with Views, terraces, gardens.
John patted my hand. “Say, I hope you’ll like your new home. I practically won this one on the golf course…Apartments aren’t easy pickin’s these days. This one is right across the street from the sea, and only two minutes’ walk from a good nursery school for the kids. I thought this offset its one big hitch—it’s a crow’s nest walk-up. Five decks, right straight up. Actually, it’s the whole top floor of an old private home, a huge old mansion built originally, I guess, for collective family living. Our floor must have been for young cousins. Anyway, we can try it. The view up there on top is terrific!”
Our golf course rental was like most deals the boys get up on the green. It had loopholes, gimmicks, and was slightly illegal besides. It was expensive, but it was Instant Living, fully furnished. Renting out house floors without a license is faintly tinged with tax ducking, but no matter. Our landlord was a Bombay Ismaili Muslim with strong latchstrings on the two paramount concerns of life: gold and God. The head of the manse, who had connections with the late Aga Khan’s sect, was a gold bullion broker, an identification that covered many enterprises, known and unknown.
But how sweet he was, our landlord—white-haired, saintly looking, dressed in immaculate white, all courtly manners. When his golfing sons rented the top floor to us, the agreement was all verbal. Nothing ever appeared in writing; there were no receipts, no bookkeeping. I was learning a new way of life.
In the whole two years of our Top Floor living, we had the sunniest of relations with the landlord and his family. I had only one complaint: once, when the Prime Minister’s sister was coming to tea, I begged the landlord’s wife to have the servants scrub the stairway, which had become a haven for pigeons. She meant well. I told her who was com-ing—“Yes, yes, my dear,” she had said—but she did nothing. My sweeper and I finally got out and did the steps in the nick of time. But aside from the birds, all was peace of the East in our multi-familied mansion by the sea!
That first night at home in India set the pace. John, laughing and clowning, carried me over the threshold, then he carried each of the twins over the threshold as well, and they thought it all very funny. Romance, thy name was never Hlavacek with the silent “H” as in ’Iggins.
John had stuffed flowers into every vase and milk bottle he could find. They stood about on every table, stiff as celery. In the children’s bedroom, two little white beds stood waiting with covers turned back. In the bathtub, warm water waited, too. A small, shy, painfully modest, very dark-skinned man—Pana, the bearer—also stood waiting to see the new chotta sahib and miss sahib.
Daddy John took the twins on a hand-in-hand tour of their new home. “Now,” he proclaimed, full of fatherhood, “we’ll jump in the tub, and then to bed.” Pana sprang forward, but John waved him off. “The first bath is for Daddy,” he said, “but maybe a glass of milk for them would be a good idea.”
Before the twins fell asleep, Danji, John’s office boy and driver combined, darkly handsome, dog-devoted to John, if prone to confusion and wildest error at times—Danji came in to bring a “Welcome” present to the Memsahib: a nosegay of pink roses. I thanked him, very pleased. Then Danji reached over and broke off one little rose. “For chotta Mary,” he explained, and he took it to her. She stood in her little nightie staring strangely up at Danji. Mary took the rose from him without a word, then skittered out of sight to tumble into her bed. She was asleep in seconds, the rose squashed in her hand. The next morning, it was still there. She has always loved Danji since. How typical of India that Mary’s attachment should grow from a rose.
In the days that followed, I wondered how India and Indians would seem to two little four-year-old Americans. I prayed that whatever impressions they had would not be breathed in public…
Nor were they. Saris and dhotis, dark skins and red dots on ladies’ foreheads, beggars, eyesore sights, cows in the streets were all accepted as part of this New Place. The twins’ comments were inquisitive—“How come” this and that—but basically their attitude was all acceptance. Maybe they inhaled my acceptance. I was enchanted with India, fascinated with all things bizarre and very Asian. My attitude, and certainly John’s solid tolerance and gentle amusement, must have been passed on to the children.
Far, far more important than acceptance of India and Indians was the twins’ growing roothold attachment to John, and his for them.
The biggest event of the day was the tower signal, “Daddy’s home!” John would bolt up the five flights, burst through the door, and the twins would go for him like puppies from a welcome mat.
Almost from the first week, he dropped the “Daddy John” business. He was simply Daddy. Every approach he made to them was simply that. He was no Sunday-best Daddy. He was the everyday one, the “real” one. He did not rush home at night with pocketfuls of candy or presents. He did not baby or pamper to win them. He was simply playing the new role straight. “No” meant “no.” “Eat your oatmeal” was firm, and spoons hit bottom fast. To bed meant to bed now, but usually after monkeyshines, flying pillows, swaying lamps, one picture bonged off the wall—
Small children are a delight, except in one capacity: screaming! If on our side was Adult Authority, on their side was the Shrill Pitch. With Mike, there were at times temper short-circuits—he went down on the floor screaming and kicking. Mary could take hers standing up, and she was uncommonly strong-piped!
As Christmas was only a few days away, all schools were closed. Friends with young children invited the twins over to play, but neither would budge an inch without having me close at hand. Children’s parties were ordeals of shyness. The biggest Christmas party was staged by the Very Organized and Very Doing American Women’s Club, which went all out to re-create a truly homey, Little-America-style party. In her best organdy float of ruffles, Mary took one look at all the other little girls she did not know, and she would not even venture through the door. Mike was braver. In one glance he spotted a ripply sliding board. He was off, chumming with the other boys, whether he knew them or not.
***
Neither child could swim, so day after day, as soon as Daddy came home, we went to the pool. Few onlookers would have guessed that we were a family of four who’d only just met, so to speak. One afternoon, an Indian lady blotting herself on a huge towel after a swim said to me, smiling, “Your little girl looks so much like her Daddy—the same brown eyes exactly!” I was too pleased to correct her.
One morning, as I sat making out a Christmas dinner menu—one scrawny Bombay turkey or two chickens?—there was a gentle tap at the door. I opened it, and there stood a lovely, young Indian woman with great, fawn-soft brown eyes. Her silk sari was a fabulous drapery of gold and purple. I did not immediately recognize her, so she quickly explained that she was one of the daughters-in-law of our landlord. “We all live right below you,” she smiled, “on what you might call the mezzanine floor.” I welcomed her inside. Delighted to have a chat with a new Indian neighbor, I led her into the living room, with its cool, lovely view of the sea.
She skipped all the routine prattle of questions the newcomer hears: How long have you been in India? How do you like India? What part of the States are you from? There was a reason for her visit. I sensed a restless mind striving for outlet, or just for someone to talk with.
She asked me eagerly, “Have you any American books I may borrow? Particularly ones on child care and training, and on what foods young children should eat?”
My household shipment was still at sea between Boston and Bombay, but I had hand-carried one motherly volume. I handed it to her with a smile. “My bible,” I joked.
“Oh yes, Spock, yes, yes, I have heard about him!” She was delighted. Then she sighed from the profoundest depth of her purple silk. “My mother-in-law will probably not like this Spock, but I will try. The trouble is—we are a collective family. All the children of all the brothers and sisters come under Mother-in-Law’s authority. She is very strict, very old-fashioned. Dinner is particularly difficult. Mother will not allow the family meal to be served until the sons are all at home. The husbands do not come home at any fixed hour. They go to the club, to golf…sometimes I do not know where my husband goes. When dinner is served, it is our heavy Indian food—rich, spicy, full of ghee. I know this is not good for my little boy. If I protest, if I say one word to Mother, she becomes very cross. ‘Look at your husband!’ she will cry. ‘I raised him on this food. Is he not healthy, strong?’ I thought perhaps if I had some outside authority to back me up, I might get the child onto a simpler diet, to bed early…and I might have some say in my child’s upbringing.”
I made polite, neutral murmurings. We chatted of many other things until I became aware of time passing and for me, many undone errands. I glanced at my watch. “Please forgive me—but I must—” I rose. She remained seated, in sweet repose on the sofa. “Would you mind,” she begged, “if I just sit here in peace and quiet, all alone, reading your Spock? Please don’t mind me. I will slip away shortly.”
I left her. She did not come back often, but when she did, it was as though my quiet sofa was her last resort, her only oasis. I was beginning to comprehend the pain and suppression of younger generations trying to make the breakthrough, getting away from the Old System of family rule. Western-educated, well-traveled Indians with sufficient means do not live with their families. Citified, they may exclaim, laughing, “Oh, God! Living with relatives! Terrible…no this and no that…no cigarettes in the house…no eating this, no cooking in certain pots and pans…no foreign friends to the house. Oh, God! Impossible! Enough to drive you mad!” But even so, the idea of a separate place of one’s own, as far from relatives and mothers-in-law as possible, is still a charcoal-smoke dream to most. They cannot afford not only the rent but the “break” in the family authority and inheritance.
I was amazed at the number of enormous, hotel-like buildings around the more fashionable areas of Bombay that were pointed out as collective family dwellings. Even more amazing was the fact that most of these Hilton-sized “homes” were owned by wealthy men who had begun life upon the sidewalks in the direst depths of ragged poverty. No one could tell or trace the diverse route, the fantastic spiral, the twisted path of rags to riches India-style, where it is claimed that in many cases the emerging millionaire cannot even read or write.
“Maybe not,” I often mused to myself, “but more important, he can count!”
My sad little silky neighbor was a constant reminder of the maddening frustration of most upper-class Indian women with both intelligence and costly education, who are left, after necessary marriage, to drift in the mill stream of days without any outlet whatever for their talents or trained minds. Even their children are raised by servants and overpowering elder relatives, whose word is Law.
Only the most tartan, tough-willed young wives can buck the disapproval of husbands, in-laws, and even their own families. Many of them do, especially in cities like Bombay, but most often it is at a cost of breaking ties and social patterns. “Why, then,” I would ask, “did your parents make such a sacrifice to send you to America to be educated in a university?” “To raise our value on the marriage market,” I was often told. American-educated daughters are considered more chic among business-minded city clans; hence, the dowry can be substantially reduced on the part of the bride’s family.
The roadblock in employment of women is a composite of many factors, all Indian: Hindu families do not look with favor on their daughters “mixing” in public places, like offices or laboratories or hospitals (most of the nurses in India are Christian or Anglo-Indian girls, not Hindu), and overriding everything, there are so few jobs paying decent salaries that men—heads of families—must be given priority.
If the mental anguish and frustration of an intelligent woman is the two-wedged corner of the box (hurting two ways), the plight of young men returning from Western universities to Mother India is worse. They return to their native land, their heads full of medicine, law, engineering, science, their hearts filled with zeal to be Needed in New India, to light the way to progress. Alas, for many of them it is the Old India, orthodox India, that awaits them. Even at the airport, the moment they arrive, it is there in the person of their venerable family and all their host of kith and kin waiting so emotionally, holding up flowers twined with silver tinsel, folding the palms and bowing, tears flowing, waiting with endearments to Capture and Clamp the young Rebel. In time, the displaced, Americanized young Indian, if he could find no escape in any job that gave some hope for utilizing his skills and training, simply gave up, settled down, married the girl the family chose for him, and bowed completely to conformity.
***
“How many more days, Mommy? Won’t it soon be Christmas?” The twins counted off the days. It seemed difficult to get into the Christmas mood as I hoisted up bathing suits or dropped shutters to the blinding sun. I had spent only one previous Christmas in India, and that had been in Simla, a far northern hill station where the snow came down in fluttering dry white flakes that clung like cotton to window frames and tree boughs. But here in Bombay, friends talked of spending Christmas Day at Juhu, at the beach. A few Hornby Road shops put out cheap, tinselly Christmas cards from England and fresh boxes of colored lights. In these, there was a booming year-round market, for no wedding was complete without a glorious fiesta of colored lights and electric bills— winking lights were strung from the grass to trees and rooftops. Other standard Christmas decorations were fireworks (a wholly British notion), balloons, crepe paper “crackers,” paper hats. Midnight Mass was a great event at the Cathedral (“Oh, my dear, the Cardinal will officiate, you must get tickets early!”). Bombay has a surprisingly large Indian Catholic community. Radio stations carried programs of Christmas music, and Bing chanted, meltingly, “White Christmas.” This would be followed by a program of popular Indian music, which sounded to the unaccustomed ear as though the crooners warbled with clothespins on their noses.