We Came, We Saw, We Left

by Charles Wheelan

  The hyena was not deterred. It moved steadily closer, locked onto the scent. I could see saliva dripping from its mouth. The lioness leapt off the rock and gave chase. Both animals moved shockingly fast. Early in the safari, I had been mildly annoyed that Stanford would not let me leave the vehicle to pee, even when there were clearly no predators in the area. I quickly came to realize that “clearly no predators in the area” is exactly what the gazelle is thinking two seconds before the lion lunges from the tall grass. On several occasions, I looked at the empty landscape only to have Stanford tap gently on my shoulder and point to a lion camouflaged less than twenty feet away.

  The lioness chased the hyena at full speed for about fifty yards before slowing down and eventually returning to her perch. The hyena lingered in the distance and then slunk away. “It’ll be back,” Stanford said. “Probably with others.” He was pessimistic that the lioness would be able to protect the kill from the hyenas during the night. Her cubs depended on that food; we were now emotionally vested in this family of lions (and not terribly impressed by what the father was contributing).

  As our safari drew to a close, the one predator we had not seen was a cheetah, though not for want of trying. We had spent long stretches driving through relatively barren areas with no cheetah sightings. Now I was looking forward to returning to camp to have a beer, write in my journal, and enjoy the warmth of the afternoon sun. “We have two hours of daylight left,” CJ pointed out.

  “I plan to enjoy that time relaxing in camp,” I said.

  “Relax tomorrow,” CJ replied.

  “I’d like to use the bathroom,” Sophie added.

  “You can hold it,” CJ told her.

  “Cheetahs are very hard to spot,” Stanford said.

  “Let’s just try,” CJ implored.

  “If I can’t hold it, I’m peeing in your water bottle,” Sophie told him.

  “Fine,” CJ agreed.

  We drove on. We saw a lion give chase to a warthog, and then a leopard hidden in the grass slowly approaching an antelope drinking at a small stream. But no cheetahs. We drove some more. Sophie brandished CJ’s water bottle. “I’m serious, you know,” she said. He ignored her.

  And then we heard a report on the radio of a cheetah sighting. Stanford drove us to a spot where a mother cheetah and a cub were relaxing in the grass. Cheetahs are the animal equivalent of a Ferrari: long, lithe bodies; tiny heads; engineered for speed. After observing for a while, we headed back toward camp. On the way, we spotted another cheetah sitting majestically on top of a termite mound, scoping out two antelope drinking from a stream about a quarter mile away. For the next half hour, we watched as the cheetah slunk through the grass, slowly and methodically making its way closer to the two antelope. One of them looked up suddenly and ran off. The other one was still drinking in the stream.

  Having heard many lectures from Stanford on how difficult it is for predators to survive, I was pulling for the cheetah. As it got to about fifty yards from the stream, the second antelope took off. The cheetah gave chase but could not close the gap. On our way to camp, we drove by the site where the lioness had fended off the hyena the day before; the deer carcass was gone, presumably stolen in the night. We were left not only with an appreciation for the beauty of the Serengeti, but also the harshness of the struggle for survival. That felt less like The Lion King.

  The safari included a flight on a small bush plane back to Dar es Salaam. The airport consisted of one small building and a dirt airstrip plopped down in the middle of the Serengeti. A steady trickle of small planes landed and took off, none carrying more than eight or ten passengers. The place felt more like a bus station than an airport, and our flight operated the same way. We landed several times before arriving back in Dar. Each time, the pilot would ask, “Okay, who is getting off here?”

  As we were waiting for the flight, I asked myself a policy question: Would the pilot be black or white? I was curious because it would tell me something about where the tourism money was going, which in turn would tell me something about East Africa. The pilot would be one of the better skilled, and therefore better paid, individuals in the safari business. Was Tanzania training local people to do these kinds of jobs? If so, that would be a great thing for the future of the country. Or would a white foreigner be flying the plane? In that case, money is leaking away from the local economy because locals are not equipped to do the top jobs.

  We ducked our heads and climbed into the tiny plane. The pilot introduced himself: Gareth, a white guy from South Africa.

  From Dar, we did a Punjabi shortcut in the middle of our Punjabi shortcut: We flew fifteen hundred miles north to Ethiopia and then caught a flight in the other direction to Cape Town, at the southern tip of the continent. (The cheapest flight is rarely the most direct.) Cape Town is extraordinary on many levels. First, it is a stunningly beautiful city, with the ocean on one side—where the Indian Ocean meets the Atlantic—and Table Mountain looming above the city on the other. The climate is temperate. We took long walks and figured out the public bus system. When we got lazy, we ordered an Uber to take us back to our apartment, which was in a quiet residential area. We spent the better part of one day hiking atop Table Mountain with its interesting birds and flowers and postcard-worthy views of the city below. South Africa is more developed than any country we had been in since Hong Kong. We took great comfort in the shopping malls and other first world conveniences. Sophie bought some cheap new clothes in an H&M store; the rest of us sat outside the store and used the free Wi-Fi.

  Second, Cape Town has become a great food and wine city. There was a café up the road from our apartment where I parked myself for hours every morning, drinking coffee, eating good food, and working to finish my novel. Sometimes I ate breakfast and lunch there. Our apartment was well equipped to cook and do laundry. While looking for pancake mix in the supermarket, we found real maple syrup. The combination of pancakes and clean underwear was a family-pleaser. We found a cheese shop in a mall near our apartment. We had eaten very little dairy while traveling, and almost no good cheese. We bought thirty dollars’ worth of fancy cheeses and several baguettes with the intention of having a picnic in one of the city’s parks. The cheese was so tempting that we never made it out of the mall. Instead we sat on a bench opposite the store and ate our picnic there.

  But what is most striking about Cape Town, and South Africa more generally, is that it is an historical miracle in progress. As we walked the streets, I had to remind myself that Apartheid lasted into the 1990s. Nelson Mandela was in prison when I graduated from college. I traveled to South Africa in 1995 to visit a friend who was teaching there. Mandela had just become president, and it was not clear if he was going to be able to hold the country together. On my flight into the country, a white South African woman sitting next to me on the plane offered to exchange South African rand for my dollars. “How much do you need?” she asked. “I’ll swap as much as you like, and I’ll give you a better rate than the banks.” Only later did I realize the motivation for her offer: She was trying to evade government restrictions on moving capital out of the country. She wanted my dollars in case things began to unravel in her country.

  At the time of that visit, Robben Island, the prison off the coast of Cape Town where Mandela and other enemies of Apartheid had been held, was not yet a museum. Instead, it was a spectral presence on the horizon that prompted me to wonder how Nelson Mandela could spend twenty-seven years in prison and emerge willing to reconcile with the white South Africans who had put him there.

  Twenty-five years later, South Africa survives as a multiracial state. There are struggles, to be sure. Every person we encountered, white or black, complained about government corruption, beginning at the top with President Jacob Zuma. We were listening to a news broadcast in an Uber when it was announced that President Zuma had fired his finance minister. “The finance minister was the only honest one. That’s why he got fired,” our driver lamented. Standard & Poor’s a
pparently agreed; they lowered South Africa’s bond rating almost immediately. (Zuma resigned in 2018, after which he faced charges for fraud, corruption, money laundering, and racketeering.)

  South Africa’s crime and violence were indirectly visible in our upscale neighborhood, where the homes were hidden behind high walls with signs warning of “Armed Response” security systems. Metal bars protected every door and window. We needed three keys to get in and out of our apartment with its multiple gates and locks.

  But still. One cannot spend time in South Africa without admiring the resiliency of the place. We saw an inspiring snapshot of South Africa’s potential on a wine tour in of the Stellenbosch region just outside of Cape Town. Leah and I left Sophie and CJ behind. We gave them the keys to the apartment, bus passes, and cash, and told them to meet us at the end of the day at a mall near the waterfront. Yes, one could technically say that we turned our children loose and went drinking for the day.

  Stellenbosch is arid and beautiful, similar to Napa. At the first stop—well before noon—we sampled two red wines and two whites. Each pour was nearly a half glass. As we enjoyed the wine, Leah turned to our guide. “How many glasses are we going to be tasting today?” she asked.

  Our guide did a rough calculation in his head. “Probably another eighteen,” he said. We moderated the size of our tastes after that. The guide (who was not tasting) drove nine of us around the vineyards in a van. Along with Leah and me, there was a couple from Brazil on their honeymoon and five nurses from Johannesburg who had come to Cape Town for a girls’ weekend. Our group was chatty and friendly and grew more so with each pour. As we were walking through the manicured grounds at the last vineyard, one of the nurses said, “We should take a group photo.” She gave her camera to a passerby and instructed us to pose. Leah and I had been talking with our guide and the Brazilian couple. The four of us stepped next to the nurses.

  The nurses were black; the Brazilian couple, the guide, and Leah and I were white. We had arrayed ourselves with blacks on one side of the group photo and whites on the other.

  “No, no, no,” the nurse who had requested the photo said. “We have to be mixed.” And then, after we moved around to create a photo more consistent with South Africa’s aspirations, she added, “We have come too far for that.”

  * Sophie still had enough pages left that she did not need a new passport.

  † As one website notes, “The Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.”

  Chapter 16

  Home Is Where Your Friends Are

  To recap: If everything went well, our journey would be rickshaw, bus, overnight train.

  Everything did not go well.

  SUMER’S DRIVER PICKED US UP at the Mumbai airport after our overnight flight from South Africa—a dollop of convenience that presaged what lay ahead. An hour later, we were sitting on an outdoor terrace having breakfast and catching up. The Shankardass family apartment is lovely, but far smaller than most suburban American homes. What makes the apartment special is the warmness and functionality of it. There is a large living room with couches and an adjacent area with a dining table. This was where we hung out for many hours of the day, like the set of a TV sitcom: talking, reading, working on our computers. Periodically we were summoned to the table for a meal, and the cook would bring an array of wonderful dishes out of the kitchen. At one point, I described our typical day in my journal: “We eat, then we do some modest activity (e.g., visiting Sumer’s office), and then we eat again.”

  Outside, Mumbai is huge, hot, crowded—and exhilarating. It is a place where irregular things happen on a regular basis. One evening, Sumer and I went for a walk to a local park. On the way back, we walked into a swarm of people gathered outside a large, elegant home. The women were in colorful burkas and white bonnets—a curious melding of the Middle East and the Amish. The men and boys were wearing long white collarless shirts (kurtas) and white caps. “What is going on?” I asked Sumer.

  “They’re Bohras,” he explained. “A Muslim sect.”

  I had never heard of them. “Why are they here?” I asked.

  “They’re hoping to see their spiritual leader, the Syedma,” Sumer said, pointing at the large house. “He lives there.” The crowd continued to grow; young and old jostled eagerly. “Any contact with the spiritual leader is considered good luck,” Sumer explained. “He can offer blessings and perform miracles.” As we began pushing our way through the expectant crowd, the Syedma’s limousine rolled into view. His followers rushed the car, trying to touch it and get a glimpse of the man in the backseat. The car passed right in front of Sumer and me. The crowd pushed us forward, and I ended up pressed against the rear door of the car, as if I had gone for a stroll in the Vatican and somehow ended up face-to-face with the Pope. The curtains on the back windows were pulled open; the Syedma waved at me tepidly. Instinctively, I waved back.

  “Are we eligible for good luck from our encounter with the spiritual leader?” I asked Sumer after the car had passed.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. So, to paraphrase Bill Murray in Caddyshack, whose character claims to have been blessed by the Dalai Lama after caddying for him, “I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.”

  Everything that makes Mumbai exhilarating also makes it exhausting. At one point, I had coffee with an old friend from college who is now a journalist. As I was leaving, I told her that I planned to walk about four hundred yards to a shopping mall, where I would meet Leah. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a taxi?” my friend asked. We could see the entrance to the mall from where we were standing. “It’s just there,” I said, pointing across a busy street toward the mall.

  “Mmm,” she acknowledged cryptically. I walked. Or, more accurately, I ran across the busy street, where the red, yellow, and green lights had no more impact on driving behavior than if decorative Christmas lights had been hung across the intersection. I narrowly missed two open sewers. I detoured around a pack of wild dogs. I waved away the taxis that swerved toward me on the sidewalk, honking incessantly in the hope of getting my business. The hawkers yelled out to me from their seats in the shade: “My friend, best price for you!”

  At first I demurred politely: “I’m fine, thank you.” This response only encouraged them; they leapt from their seats brandishing samples of their merchandise. I ignored the offers, which continued unabated. Eventually I became annoyed, in part because I had just stepped in dog poop: “Really?” I exclaimed in exasperation. “Do I look like a guy trying to buy a cast-iron pot?” When I had set out on my four-hundred-yard walk, I estimated the temperature at about ninety degrees; now I was convinced it was at least a hundred and five.

  “What happened to you?” Leah asked when I stumbled into the lobby of the movie theater. “And what smells so bad?”

  Those who can afford it find places to escape from the chaos. During the British Raj, the Foreign Service officers who were “sent out” to India, built clubs where they drank and played cards and escaped the heat. There is some irony in the fact that India’s elite now inhabit similar places where they do similar things. Sometimes they are literally the same clubs, inherited from the British after independence. One of those clubs is the Royal Willingdon Sports Club, founded in 1918 by then-governor of Mumbai Lord Willingdon.

  The noise and chaos of Mumbai recede as one enters the gates of the Willingdon Club. There are tennis courts, squash courts, a golf course, a restaurant, a barbershop, a little grocery store, and a large manicured lawn on which members can drink and dine at small tables. Each table has a bell for summoning a waiter. Mumbai’s wealthy and influential all seem to know each other; this is one place they assemble. I played golf with Sumer and two of his friends. We had six caddies for our group: one caddy for each of our bags, plus two forecaddies who stood out in the fairway to spot our balls as they came to rest.

  For all the luxury of the Willingdon Club, there was one incongruity: a striking number
of dogs wandering the grounds, many of whom were sleeping comfortably in the sand traps on the golf course. The dogs looked healthy but out of place roaming the manicured lawns of Mumbai’s most prestigious club. Eventually I asked Sumer about this oddity. “Ah, Charlie,” he said with a smile, clearly relishing an opportunity to tell a story, perhaps apocryphal. “When the club was British, there were signs posted on the grounds: No dogs or Indians. Now there are both.” I am not going to try to justify the social order in India. I will say that a gin and tonic on the lawn of the Willingdon Club—following my haircut and head massage—felt very good after living out of a backpack for seven months.

  We ate well. The apartment was cozy. But what made the visit with the Shankardass family so joyful was that we felt like family. The highlight of our stay was an engagement dinner for a nephew. Sumer’s sister—the prospective groom’s mother—had died of brain cancer some years ago, leaving Sumer as a surrogate parent for her twin boys, one of whom was engaged to be married. During our stay, there was a party at which the bride’s family and groom’s family would meet for the first time. The Wheelans were the only non-family invited. Sumer loaned me some nice clothes and even a dab of cologne, making me feel civilized in a way that I had not for a long time. We were invited for eight o’clock; we showed up sometime after nine.

  The ceremony began with the young couple exchanging rings. Next, there was a prayer ceremony in front of a small temple in the corner of the room. Sumer offered me running commentary as the ceremony progressed. “Most Hindu families have a little temple like that in their home,” he explained. The future bride and groom covered their heads with small cloths, a sign of respect, and asked for a blessing from God. The families joined them in singing a prayer, after which the couple bowed down and touched the feet of their parents and grandparents. “I touched my granddad’s feet every day,” Sumer whispered. “It’s a sign of respect, like shaking hands.” The prospective bride and groom gave each other a sweet—“the sweetening of the mouth”—after which both families offered them a champagne toast.