In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

113 DOI: 10.7330/9780874218930.c07 Seven Tinkly Temple Bells Before I even arrived in 1966, India had already entered my consciousness in many ways. Thanks in part to the Beatles and their maharishi , the country was enjoying a resurgence as a place of mysticism and mystery. Sitars and tablas could be heard in Western pop and rock music. In the East Village, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg—both influenced by and a propagator of tropes of the Asian East and its mysticism—was a major presence, writing, chanting, being. And the more mobile hipsters who traveled abroad in increasing numbers often made India their endpoint, where they could trip out on saddhus and ganja. As someone who had just passed through the East Village, I was not immune to these influences. Yet I had not been able to shake my childhood book- and movie-inspired images of dashing English sahibs striding through the Khyber Pass to quell native mutinies or play the “Great Game” of British and Russian rivalry on the fabled North West Frontier; so I was also aware of India as a oncecolonial place. I set out under the sober auspices of the US government as one of a band of ultra-respectable Fulbright exchange scholars, not a seeker after gurus. If a colonial past and mysticism loomed large in my mind, so did other quite secular stereotypes. I was going to an overpopulated country. In 1966 India ranked as the world’s second most populated country, with nearly half a billion people. I was not aware of the actual statistics—498,883,000 people, to be exact—but expected a land of teeming masses where great crowds would be jostling for places. India was also an impoverished county. In 1966 its gross domestic product was barely more than 3 percent of America’s— another statistic I did not actually know. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, who died in 1964, still stood in my mind as a key postwar world leader. I knew I was going to a land of five-year plans Tinkly Temple Bells 114 and some sort of nationalistic socialism as well as fakirs and many-armed gods. Indeed, I was headed for a place where ancient-looking holy men and a unique sort of modernism lived side by side. I knew that India was also a land of great stories and was, according to some older theories, the home of the folktale; the great myths of Shiva and Vishnu and Krishna stood out vaguely in my head. Surely I might evolve some stories of my own. Of those stories that I came away with, several relate to the traveling itself and suggest that to me this trip was indeed a serious journey into another world and other modes of life—by no means a casual jaunt. Other stories foreground the nature of that other world. The Journey and Arrival The journey seemed an arduous one, perhaps more so than in the days of the P & O passenger liners with their leisurely deck games, long stops at Port Said, and comfortable cabins. Prior to the trip, my plane tickets were lost, and this incident became one of my first stories—a story that stressed this Eastern journey as a difficult one, even before I literally left on it. American Express handled Fulbright travel, and although they had been informed that I had shifted back to 7002 Ridge, they insisted on sending my tickets to my East Village apartment. There they were marked “Return to Sender” and sent back to Amex. I spent a day running around to various Amex offices—seemingly all over Manhattan—tracking them down. I explained my problem multiple times to multiple clerks and executives. Finally someone thought to come up with duplicate tickets, but it was little comfort for the anguished day I expended on the eve of my departure worrying over documents that would enable me to go! Days later, when I finally flew there, the open-air terminals at the New Delhi airport, thick with flying insects—threw up a wall of amazingly hot and sticky air (I thought I knew heat from those hot, muggy New York summers) before an air-conditioned bus whisked the Fulbright group to the YMCA Tourist Hostel, where we had rooms to bathe and change. But not before I picked up another story about my first encounter with the corrupt bureaucrats who I assumed filled the Third World. I suppose...

Share