We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  The Indian Communists have rejected the kinds of policies adopted elsewhere in the country to promote growth—as evidenced by our dilapidated Ambassador taxis. These boxy vehicles were manufactured by Hindustan Motors beginning in the 1950s, back when India was determined to promote its domestic auto industry and exclude foreign competition. Like the East German Trabant and the Soviet Lada, the Ambassador did not fare well when consumers were offered alternatives. Hyundais and Toyotas replaced Ambassadors across India when the economy was opened up in the early 1990s. But not in Calcutta, where the Ambassador is still the dominant taxicab, presumably because of some regulatory concession granted by the West Bengal government. Many of these were queued up outside the Calcutta airport and looked to be thirty years old, with parts literally taped or wired in place.

  We gave the two taxi drivers the name of the restaurant, and off we went, weaving our way through people, cars, trucks, carts, animals. The Ambassadors could not go more than about thirty-five miles an hour before we began to worry that a door or some other important component might fall off. The soundtrack for our cross-city trip was an incessant honking, to which our drivers contributed aggressively. We found the restaurant and stacked our bags around a table. A large chalkboard on the wall displayed the Bengali dishes on offer. Periodically a waiter would go to the board and erase an item. The food was distinctive and delicious—well worth a ride across the city. India’s chaos felt more familiar and less off-putting than what we had experienced in other crowded cities in Southeast Asia. Perhaps it was because English is a unifying language in India, making us feel less cut off. Or maybe it was because we had spent time in the country before. Whatever the reasons, the “full Calcutta”—broadly consistent with what we had drawn up in the airport—left the family in good spirits.

  That evening we sequestered ourselves in a Calcutta hotel, where the cacophony of noise from the street was muffled but still audible. Katrina, who was killing time with us before I took her back to the airport around midnight, grew progressively more morose. She had a cold—her third in a month—and she had lost weight. The leishmaniasis was likely sapping her immune system. The anti-malaria medicine may have had that effect, too. (One side benefit of getting to Germany was that she would be able to ditch the malaria pills.) Mostly, though, Katrina was nervous about the impending treatment. Katrina was working for a stretch on Leah’s computer. When she returned it, Leah noticed that there were multiple tabs open related to leishmaniasis.

  Leah and I had offered repeatedly to fly to Munich with Katrina for her treatment. She adamantly refused that offer; there seemed no point in forcing it. If necessary, one of us could hop on a plane later. Katrina would be staying in Munich with her friend Kati, who had found the leishmaniasis doctor and was fluent in German. Katrina did agree to let me take her to the airport. A little before midnight, I called an Uber. Our driver had a “real car,” as opposed to a flimsy Ambassador. It was not clear which was more terrifying: an Ambassador taxi traveling slowly but at risk of falling apart; or a modern car driving excessively fast through darkened streets as peddlers and stray dogs appeared suddenly from the shadows.

  A dense fog had settled over the city by the time we reached the airport, making it look like an eerie film set. A security official stopped Katrina and me as we entered the terminal. “Tickets,” he demanded. Katrina showed him her ticket. “Okay,” he said, waving her inside. As I went to follow her, he stopped me.

  “I’m dropping her off,” I explained.

  “Not without a ticket,” the man answered. Katrina and I stood awkwardly on the sidewalk.

  “I should go,” Katrina said.

  “We love you, hon,” I said, giving her a hug. She turned and went through the automatic doors into the airport: our oldest daughter, headed to Munich to be treated for a flesh-eating parasite. I hailed an Ambassador taxi from the queue and headed back to the hotel.

  The remaining four of us visited a travel agent on a busy Calcutta side street to book an excursion to Sundarbans National Park, a coastal mangrove forest several hours from Calcutta that is the natural habitat for Bengal tigers. A sprightly woman who was at least seventy years old suggested that we take an overnight trip to a tourist lodge there. She crowed about the luxurious accommodations, the delicious food, the boat cruise to spot tigers, and the all-inclusive nature of the resort. “You will not be reaching for your wallet!” she assured us. We liked her. We appreciated her enthusiasm and salesmanship. We booked the excursion. Yes, we would be staying at a government-run tourist lodge. And yes, the Communists had run the West Bengal government for decades, making it slightly less efficient and consumer-friendly than the rest of the Indian government. But maybe we would see tigers.

  Sundarbans is on the Bay of Bengal, where four major rivers converge. The land is flat and many of the fields were flooded. On the drive from Calcutta, we shared the road with every manner of wheeled vehicles: scooters, trucks, bicycles, and even tricycles with platforms mounted on the back, transforming them into the Indian equivalent of a pickup. We passed ducks, pigs, cows, goats, sheep, and dogs. Everyone was in motion: walking, pushing, pounding, stacking, selling. That is part of the wonder of India; there is no idleness. The place somehow lurches along, with the saris and bright school uniforms adding color to it all.

  As foretold, I did not reach for my wallet at the “resort.” There was nothing to spend money on. Our luxury lodge consisted of several cement bunkhouses surrounded by pools of stagnant water. The bunkhouses reeked of mildew, and the mattresses felt like plywood. CJ and Sophie shared a room with two beds, one of which was so badly stained that they agreed to share the other. But we were not in Sundarbans for the luxury; we were there to see tigers.

  We set out the following morning in a boat that meandered through the coastal waterways, searching the shore for the elusive Bengal tiger. The gnarled roots of the mangroves formed a web along the water’s edge. I saw some interesting birds. Once I saw a deer walking alone in a clearing. I focused my telephoto lens on it, eagerly anticipating the moment when a tiger would leap from the bushes and attack. That did not happen. We stopped at a small preserve to climb an observation tower. Our guide pointed to marks in the mud below. “Wild boar prints,” he said.

  “Maybe the tigers will come eat the boars,” I suggested.

  “Yes,” the guide assured me without conviction.

  We did not see a tiger, or even a boar. There were monkeys everywhere, which had long since ceased being a novelty for us. I did manage to get a photo of two monkeys having sex, which had been on my bucket list. In that respect, Sundarbans was not a complete bust.

  We took an evening cruise and saw less, at least in terms of wildlife. The main channel was full of freighters making their way to the ocean: a parade of enormous cargo ships, each the length of a city block, stretching as far as we could see. We had set out looking for tigers. We got a snapshot of the global economy instead.

  The drive back to Calcutta was one of the worst three vehicle rides of my life—not the three most unpleasant rides, but the three during which I felt most at risk of dying in a fiery wreck. Our driver, who had been needlessly aggressive in overtaking cars and vehicles on the way to Sundarbans, became downright crazy on the way back. I think he was under the influence of some substance. We roared through small villages just as school was letting out and students were walking on the side of the road. At one point, he swerved toward the middle of the road and hit a duck square on, killing it instantly. I tried to convince myself that the driver, recognizing that he was going to hit the duck, had tried to hit it squarely to avoid unnecessary pain. But when he deliberated swerved toward a dog that was not in our path, nearly hitting it before turning away at the last minute, I realized that he was doing this for fun. I yelled at him to slow down, which he did for thirty seconds. This became the pattern all the way to Calcutta. He drove like a lunatic. I screamed at him. He slowed down for less than a minute—and then he sped up again.

>   When we arrived back in Calcutta, I called the woman who had sold us on the trip to complain about the driver. “Oh yes, the driving in India is so chaotic,” she replied merrily, as if I were a naïf who had been caught off guard by India’s bustling roads.

  “He’s a psychopath,” I said.

  “Hah! These drivers are so crazy!” she said.

  “He was trying to kill things,” I pointed out.

  “The roads are so busy with animals,” she agreed. By then, I knew the driver’s job was secure. I did not have the energy to point out that the “luxury lodge” was a complete dump.

  Katrina sent us an update from Munich. A biopsy at the tropical disease clinic confirmed that she had the “New World” strain of leishmaniasis. She began a twenty-eight-day regimen of pills. The medicine was fairly toxic; there were some comparisons to chemo. Katrina would have to report to the clinic once a week to have blood drawn in order to check for side effects. She moved into Kati’s student apartment, and the two of them made plans to travel around Europe between the weekly appointments. Leah and I were enormously relieved that Katrina was finally in a place where she had a clear diagnosis and was getting proper treatment.

  Back in Calcutta, we used our final day in the city to plan for our return to India, after the Punjabi shortcut to Africa.† In addition to our stay with the Shankardass family in Mumbai, we planned to visit the state of Kerala in the south of India. Sophie’s friend from home, Isabel, would be joining us for that stretch. Isabel had never been out of the United States, and we wanted her to have “an authentic Indian experience.” To that end, we decided that we would travel from Kerala to Mumbai on an overnight train. The sleeper cars on the overnight trains fill up weeks in advance. We found a travel agent (different than the one who booked our Sundarbans adventure) to book our rail reservations. We informed him that we wanted to buy overnight train tickets for the twenty-seven-hour trip from Kochi (a city in the state of Kerala) to Mumbai. He looked confused. “It’s faster to fly,” he said.

  “Yes, I know,” I acknowledged.

  “It’s cheaper also,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I agreed.

  “So do you want to fly?” he asked. “Because it’s faster and cheaper.”

  “No,” I said. I tried to explain to him that the overnight train would offer a more complete Indian experience for our family and for Sophie’s friend Isabel. He looked at me as if I had told him that I was hoping to contract syphilis in order to better understand what it was like to have a venereal disease. We filled out lots of forms and returned later to pick up our tickets. It turns out that taking the train is not just longer and more expensive than flying; the tickets are also harder to book. Eventually we secured our reserved berths.

  I suspect that even our skeptical travel agent did not envision what would go wrong in the middle of the night on that rail journey.

  * Punjab is one of the Indian states.

  † Although Leah, CJ, and Sophie were returning to India, enough time had passed after our first visit to the country that they were able to apply for another single-entry visa, which is relatively easy to get online.

  Chapter 15

  One Afternoon in Tanzania

  I was responsible for buying the tickets for the lunch buffet, which cost seven thousand shillings, or about three dollars a person. “Why do you think it’s so expensive?” I asked Leah.

  “I think we’ve just been traveling for a long time,” Leah pointed out. “Because that’s really not very much money for a full buffet.”

  WE WOULD RETURN TO INDIA for our train trip. In the meantime, the Punjabi shortcut (Calcutta to Mumbai via Africa) took us across the Indian Ocean to Tanzania on the east coast of Africa. We rented a spacious and affordable two-bedroom apartment in a middle-class area of the capital, Dar es Salaam. The apartment had a serviceable kitchen, decent air-conditioning, and a washing machine. As is typical in much of the world, there was no dryer. The landlord instructed us to hang our wet laundry on the roof, a task that fell to me. After we did a load of wash, I climbed up a ladder in the hallway on the top floor of the building and then through a hatch in the ceiling. Once I was on the roof, I leaned down and Leah handed me the basket of clothes from below. The clothesline was on the far end of the roof. I began pinning our wet clothes to the line using a bucket of clothespins I found nearby.

  The day was hot, but there was a pleasant cooling breeze from the Indian Ocean. Tanzania is a place where the Middle East meets Africa. From the roof, I had a sweeping view of Dar es Salaam: minarets rising along the skyline in one direction, and the glimmering blue ocean in the other. I had two thoughts as I hung the family laundry. The first was picayune: Use lots of clothespins. The family would excoriate me if our wet clothing blew off the roof into the streets below. The second was a burst of awareness: I am standing on a roof in Africa, looking out over Dar es Salaam and the Indian Ocean, pinning our laundry to a clothesline.

  The manager of our Airbnb apartment was a woman named Janet. When she stopped by to inquire if everything was okay, we got to talking. Sophie mentioned that she had an interest in schools and children; Janet seemed excited by the topic. She invited us to visit a facility she operates for children with special needs. We eagerly accepted the invitation. Janet warned in vague terms that many of the children had physical handicaps. We assured her that we were comfortable with that. She offered to send her driver for us at two o’clock that afternoon.

  The driver showed up without Janet and said very little. He drove us through a more affluent part of the city, where apartment buildings gave way to estates with razor wire atop their high walls. Eventually we turned into a small complex that we learned was a residential facility for roughly twenty children of various ages with profound physical disabilities—far beyond anything we had encountered at home. Several of the children had no physical disabilities but were afflicted with albinism, an absence of skin pigment. Albinos are persecuted in parts of Africa because people believe them to be cursed.

  There was no sign of Janet. The children huddled around us: in wheelchairs, on scooters, or, in a few cases, having dragged themselves along the ground. They looked at us; we looked at them. We asked a few basic questions in English, and one or two of the students answered awkwardly. Soon a large van arrived with several young men who worked at the facility. “We are going to Janet’s house,” one of them told us. The children scrambled excitedly into the van. The young men carried those who were not able to climb in by themselves. Wheelchairs were collapsed and loaded up. And then the Wheelan family climbed in, wondering where Janet’s house was and what were we going to do when we got there.

  Janet’s house turned out to be a modest ranch not far away. As the van pulled up in front, it was clear the kids had been there many times before. They climbed out, or were carried out, and immediately scrambled through the front door into Janet’s home. We followed them through the house to a back patio that overlooked a large, sprawling lawn and then the ocean. Some of the children settled comfortably on the lawn, where there was a trampoline and a bicycle. Some headed straight through the backyard to a gate with access to a rocky beach and swimming area in a protected cove. We realized that for the kids with the most severe disabilities, swimming with a flotation device was easier than getting around on land.

  Janet invited us to join her on the patio with her brother and sister. The siblings were in town because their mother had died recently. A family friend was there, too—an economist who had done development work across East Africa. The patio, with its shade and ocean breeze, was ten or fifteen degrees cooler than the rest of the city. We drank tea and talked about Tanzania, about the children, and about politics in Tanzania and the U.S.

  As we sipped our tea, Janet told us about the children. She was not paid to take care of them. She was not running a government program or even a nonprofit organization. She had, for lack of a better description, begun collecting children who had been discarded by Tanzania
n society. I assume she had personal money to fund all this, though we never asked. In a country without a serious social safety net, Janet had built a home for children who would otherwise be living on the street. She pointed at the lawn and described where each child had come from. Most had been cast out because their families felt they were too expensive, or cursed, or both. Some of the children had been begging by the side of the road when Janet found them. Some had been brought to her. Albinism runs in families, so in one case she had taken in siblings.

  What these children had in common was that Janet had rescued them from destitution. She funded the residential facility we had seen. She connected each child with the best available schooling. And she opened her home to all of them every weekend. As Janet explained all this to us on the cool patio, Sophie sat down on the lawn and opened a simple game on her phone. She invited several of the girls to join her. Soon she had a crowd of laughing children gathered around her. This led to other games that went on for hours.

  CJ climbed on the trampoline and attracted a different group, mostly boys. They were fascinated with his straight blondish hair and insisted on running their hands through it. I loaned CJ my phone so he and the children could take photos and videos. They would snap a photo or video on the trampoline and then crowd around the phone to look and laugh at it. (I spent a long time the next day deleting about five hundred pictures and videos—but I kept a few.) There was a tremendous amount of joy and laughter coming from the lawn. CJ and Sophie were in the middle of it.

  I was struck by the resilience and joy of these kids, who were among the most disadvantaged humans on the planet. It is tough to be born without legs in the U.S. or in Europe; it is orders of magnitude more difficult to confront that challenge in Tanzania. These children comported themselves with remarkable dignity. I was also awed by what Janet had chosen to do. I am not a religious person, yet I found religious language to be the only way to describe that afternoon. We were surrounded on the lawn by God’s children and Janet was doing God’s work. To be honest, it also made me feel small. Her profound generosity shone a light on what the rest of us might do to make the world better. And I was deeply proud of CJ and Sophie. For all their squabbling and pettiness at other junctures, they jumped into an emotionally fraught situation and became the center of fun. The awkwardness of those early minutes at the residential facility gave way to hours of comfortable interaction. Sophie, CJ, and the other children bounced on the trampoline, and they laughed, and they played games, and they took selfies, and they shared a lovely afternoon.