Out In The Mid-Day Sun

ut tlte IV l I i A J - A J att cr s BY MONICA MARTIN An Atlantic Monthly Press Book Little, Brown and Company Boston TO MY DAUGHTER INDIA has a curious effect on you, when you have lived close to her people an effect difficult to throw off, no matter how far away yon may go. For sixteen years India was my home. Then, just before the outbreak of the World War in 1939, illness took me back to England. My life in England from 1939 to 1945 was sufficiently full of battling urge and impetus to blot out everything else. Private tragedy, I thought, had closed an earlier chapter. In 1945, with the end of hostilities in Europe, I was offered a two-year assignment in connection with service clubs in India. I sailed almost immediately for Bombay. Before I left, friends asked me why I had chosen to go back. It is difficult to put the intangible into words. I remembered the time when a neighbor of mine in India had received a letter from her schoolgirl daugh ter in England. The child wrote, I want to smell the bazaars again. With me it was not the queer pungent smell of the East I wanted. Neither did I wish to see my old home. Too much lay in between. Most of all I wanted to see for myself the great progress already made by India in forging her own destiny. On this visit I lived in cities and cantonments, in the plains, and in the mountains. The beggars were still there, it is true vii Introduction so was the dirt. The great Bengal iron and steel works at Kulti were still there. The foundries of Tatanagar were working day and night, for they had learned to forge munitions of war as well as engines of peace and beyond their walls were the same fields being scratched by the same inefficient woodenploughs. The strange juxtaposition of modern and ancient ways was still there, but one felt a vast undercurrent bounding for ward. To my interested eyes, the most striking change was the advance made by the women of India, made, too, without much encouragement from their menfolk. Girls in fluttering saris were riding bicycles to and from their offices. In 1939 just six years before no Indian girl ever worked in a business of fice. In the hospitals were more girls who were trained nurses. There were never enough, and they were heavily outnumbered by Indian Christians and Anglo-Indian girls but that they were there at all was earth-shaking. India will always be a land of extremes and contrasts, but some things will stand. Once again I saw the mighty Himalayas, ceiling of the world, and once again marveled that anything on this earth could be so high. Once again I swallowed clouds of dust on the plains, and swam in crystal lakes in the mountains. India the cruel. India the beautiful. Although you vow you will have no more of her, she tugs at you. She is beauty and delight. She is disease and sudden death. Smallpox, her people say, is the kiss of Kali, goddess of destruction. The deadly cobra is sacred, for once he spread his hood to shade the great god Siva. If you assess her by standards of plain thinking, you be come lost in a fog in this country of impossible nonsense and potential greatness. Yet, if you encounter her young enough, if you live in the real India, not in the cities, or in congeries of viii Introduction your fellow men, where you are forever pigeonholed in a life of social routine, your mind becomes stamped with something you carry till you die. M. M. New Delhi 1946 NewYork 2948 Introduction vii 1. Journey to India 3 2. My First Station 13 3. We Settle at Domchanch 19 4. Lessons in Urdu Lessons on Mica 29 5. Sonepur Mela, an Indian Fair 35 6. Domchanch Colony 44 7. Still Farther Away 51 8. Food and Water 58 9. Vacation by the Ganges 65 10. First Big Game Shoot 71 11. Saris and Ceremonies 83 12. Hot Winds Burning . . . 91 13. Johnnie 97 14. Tropical Landscape Gardening 108 15. As Cooks Go n8 Contents 1 6. Monsoon and Malaria 124 17. Forest Touring 133 1 8. Temi Bahadur, Our Biggest Tusker 146 19...