Landing Right Side up in Nehru’S India: Field Notes from a Punjab Sojourn

By Jean Durgin Harlan

An enjoyable memoir of India.

--Kirkus Reviews

On Indias Independence Day in 1962, an Ohio family of six landed dockside at the Bombay Harbor, stranded by holiday miscommunications. It was a fitting introduction to an upside down lifestyle ahead. A two day train journey to their temporary home in the Punjab confirmed the fascination and unpredictability of travel in India.

A Fulbright grant bought them to Chandigarh, the ten-year-old Punjab capitol. Making a home and learning to adjust to Indias complex ways were challenges. Culture shock hit often, and local schools stunned the children. Fortunately, neighbors were welcoming.

Journeys by bus and train took them almost the length and breadth of India. Visits to the Taj Mahal, the Ganges at Benares, the Sikh Golden Temple, four major cities, a hill station, an ancient cave temple carved from rock, and a mud-hut village just skimmed the surface of all that is India. But they revealed awesome beauty and appalling poverty.

Traveling abroad with an open mind and a spirit of adventure can be transformational for any of us. For the author, a single serendipitous photograph on a Punjab college wall recast the entire trajectory of her path toward a fulfilling lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475956252

Jean Durgin Harlan

Jean Durgin Harlan, PhD, taught child development at Ohio University. She is the author of Science Experiences for the Early Childhood Years, Kindergarten Science, and Science As It Happens. Retired from her clinical psychology practice, Harlan lives in Columbus, Ohio. She has five children and eleven grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2012 Jean Durgin Harlan

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-5623-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5624-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-5625-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012919753

iUniverse rev. date: 3/13/2013

Contents

1 The Journey Begins

2 Bombay: We Arrive

3 Chandigarh Launch

4 Down the Rabbit Hole

5 Settling In

6 Domestic Hierarchy

7 Nest Feathering

8 Kitchen Matters

9 The Landscape

10 Child Life

11 Friends and Neighbors

12 Social Life

13 Home Science College

14 Subcontinent Travels

15 Punjab Adventures

16 Retrospection

For my children and grandchildren,

with love

Preface

Whether I’m actually hearing it or just catching a random auditory memory, a particular low, three-note birdcall sounding against a quiet background still summons a poignant India moment. The instant-replay scene takes place shortly after dawn in the spring of l963. I’m standing on the balcony of our room in the New Delhi YMCA Hostel. It overlooks Janpath Road, a major thoroughfare lined by day with roadside peddlers crouched on the ground next to high compound walls, their wares spread out on cloths beside them. All day and into the evening, the road is teeming with animal and human traffic, moving on foot or by transport of many sorts. But in this snapshot, the road is almost empty and, except for the birdcall, silent.

The air is remarkably cool, carrying dampness after an evening rain. It is laced with the pleasantly pungent odor of an unknown tree. Its rich tang is permanently locked into my fragrance memory. The street has been washed clean by the rain. The only human stirrings of life are two barefoot sweepers, a man and a woman, walking on opposite sides of the road, each shouldering a short twig broom. I am peaceful, alone on the balcony while my family sleeps indoors. I am feeling deeply connected with this part of the world that has unexpectedly captured my heart.

This memory still brings me a full rush of joy. It pushes me to gather my old travel diaries and the faded aerogram letters I sent from India to my parents, using them to unlock memories to form a personal narrative of our months living on the other side of the world. Virginia Woolf claimed, Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded. I’m putting this down just in case she was right.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Senator William Fulbright for conceiving his international educational exchange plan, Sherie Doongaji for giving me new purpose, and William Harlan for having the boldness to give his family a priceless India adventure.

I am grateful to my children, Betsy Harlan, Anne Harlan Strohm, John Trumbull Harlan, Susan Harlan Borghese, and Julie Harlan-Schneider, for their encouragement to record these memories. I also value the insights of my critique group and other friends: Honey Abramson, Sharon Addy, Pat Brown, Kalen Cap, Bebe Lavin, Jamie Rhein, Leslie Robinson, Erica Scurr, and especially Suzanne Miller and Estelle Silberman. I also appreciate the important support and guidance of my editorial consultant George Nedeff. Thank you all so much.

Introduction

On August 13, 1962, the SS Victoria steamed into the Bombay Harbor, and my family’s grand India adventure began. Nearly fifty years later, kaleidoscopic images of our months there were still strong memories for the children and me, but they were vague wisps of family history to my grandchildren. Because that history has helped shape their lives, I was moved to write a more coherent narrative of our stay in North India. I wanted to help them understand how their parents’ lives and their own have been influenced by the impact of that experience.

It was my husband’s Fulbright grant to teach at Punjab University in Chandigarh that took us to India. At last count, over fifty thousand American Fulbright scholars have been awarded these significant cross-cultural opportunities to promote international understanding. Grant recipients have been described as major multipliers because of their measurable influence on their students, and their scholarly work when they returned. Imagine the scope of the next Fulbright Foundation survey if it could include the impact of those international living experiences on accompanying family members, and even beyond that to the expanded worldview of their subsequent generations.

Our children’s Punjab experience permanently embedded venturesome strands into their lives. Their later experience in South India as accompanying Fulbright family members included their new sibling, Julie, who mostly remembers Bangalore for monkeys and pet ants. All five have had further adventures abroad, especially John, with the Peace Corps in French Cameroon. Julie Harlan-Schneider was a Witness for Peace in Guatemala, traveled in Europe and the South Pacific for the World Resources Institute, and shared travel with her husband during his architectural study grant in Japan. All five have prepared with graduate work to participate in helping professions or those focusing on global issues.

Perspectives they absorbed in their India experiences are now woven into the values of their own children who have traveled, studied, and worked internationally: thus far, Kate Harlan as an ASF exchange student in Belgium; Laura Harlan as an AFS exchange student in Ecuador; Liz Harlan in study trips to the Far East and Chile, and teaching English in Ghana. Liz now studies in the Emory University Global Health graduate program. Kate, Liz, and Laura have participated in volunteer service trips in the Dominican Republic. Rachel Strohm studied abroad in Toulouse and Prague, and interned in Rwanda, the Congo, and Ghana. After completing the Johns Hopkins International Studies graduate program, Rachel now travels Africa for World Poverty Initiatives. My other grandchildren—Lauren Strohm, Chris Bales, Nina and Sophia Borghese, and Ellie, Simone, and Josie Schneider— have not yet had the experience of independent travel abroad, but I am sure that they will in the future, and will also find it life enhancing.

For my part, the experience of temporarily changing worlds created a watershed parting two phases of my life. It allowed me to leave behind in Ohio what I had become, and bring back from India what I could become.

1 The Journey Begins

M ost epic, life-transforming journeys begin with months of strategic planning. For my family, our India adventure burst upon us without preliminary notice when my husband, Bill, rushed home in early June 1962 with a stunning announcement. We’re going to India. The Fulbright came through! It’s for a visiting lectureship at the Punjab University in North India. We’re sailing from New York on July 16.

Before he shared news of the India award with me, he took time to lock in his leave of absence from Ohio University. He also booked two staterooms for us on the SS Constitution to Naples, and on the SS Victoria from Naples to Bombay. Our memorable expedition from Athens, Ohio, to Chandigarh, the ten-year-old capital of the Punjab State, had to be organized in five whirlwind weeks.

With no time for Bill to claim his sabbatical status and salary, we needed to scrape together travel funds on short notice for five family members. In those times, before credit cards made borrowing easy, this required emptying the children’s savings accounts, selling the car, swinging a large loan at the bank, and booking the most economical means of transportation. Bill bore down on making these arrangements. Happily, tourist-class ocean voyages were then a bit cheaper than air travel, perfect justification for us to make our exciting passage to India by sea and train.

Fulbright grants pay travel expenses for the grantee, but accompanying family members pay their own way. A friend who had taught in Burma urged me to apply for a Fulbright travel grant as a part-time teacher. It would cover all of my Athens to Chandigarh travel costs. It won’t matter that you don’t have a degree in education. You’ll be needed, and you’ll need something to do. I assured her I would have plenty to do in my usual role as full-time mother and homemaker. But, just in case a college in Chandigarh happened to need a teacher with a bachelor of science degree in home economics, I did apply.

For our three older children, the immediate prospect of ocean crossings softened the wrench of being uprooted for a year of separation from their friends and the familiar. Susan, our youngest child, was unable to grasp the adventure concept. She was simply bewildered by the ensuing disruption of the household rhythms. Organizing the quick shift from Ohio to India forced me into crisis mode, facing an overwhelming list of required tasks:

1.   Prepare the house for furnished rental (i.e., empty all cupboards, closets, and drawers; store valuables; clean basement; at least sweep the garage; and more). Also, wallpaper upstairs bathroom, a task left undone for several years while awaiting an executive decision about the tile job it actually needed.

2.   Find responsible renters.

3.   Make or buy clothes for growing children for a year ahead.

4.   Schedule the whole-family passport photo of Betsy, 12; Anne, 9; John, 7; Susan, 3; Bill, 47; and me, 38.

5.   Meet older children’s teachers to project what they should be learning in the year ahead.

6.   Meet with two friends who had lived in India and Burma to gather household management tips.

7.   Organize a schedule of inoculations recommended for survival in India.

8.   Pack three trunks with bare-necessity household goods, books, winter clothes, and children’s gear to ship ahead in just three weeks.

I wasn’t without occasional help. For example, Susan assisted me with task 8. More times than I had patience for, I would find her delving headfirst into a carefully packed trunk, pitching aside neat stacks of clothes to see if her significant possessions were hidden at the bottom, fearful that they would be lost forever.

My aunt Faith, in town to attend a workshop, came one night to aid my desperate attempts to make paper adhere to a bathroom wall unprepared to accept it. Standing in the bathtub, arms draped in dripping wallpaper, Faith laughed and said, I can’t believe I’m doing this! But she was, and we finished the messy job as a team.

In addition to these chores, my normal housekeeping duties were required: cleaning, cooking, dishwashing, shopping, chauffeuring children to summer school, weeding, laundering, ironing, and such. Bill was at the office all day and night making his own preparations, including an impossibly long India reading list for me. I did manage to read that Chandigarh was planned by the Swiss architect Le Corbusier and divided according to general function into self-contained sectors. We would live in the University Sector 14.

Somehow, all was accomplished in time for us to board an evening train to Washington, thence to another train to New York, where we spent a day before boarding the Naples-bound SS Constitution. Well before we walked up the gangway to that handsome ship, we met the albatross of our journey: baggage. Betsy’s suitcase had been mistakenly sent to Boston, necessitating a shopping trip to Macy’s to buy replacement clothing and luggage for her. That was only the beginning of our baggage burdens.

A travel-savvy friend advised me to avoid mingling clothes for individual children in large suitcases. She extolled the virtue of providing each child with a small bag of special books and treasures, and a separate bag of clothing. Her boys liked holding on to their own belongings. That sounded to me like a tangible source of security for children, as well as good organization. Novice world traveler that I was, it didn’t occur to me that a month of travel, involving many changes from train to train, to hotel to ship, to hotel to train to another ship, to hotel to train and yet another train presented baggage challenges different from her family travels. Their trips just involved direct international flights from departure city to final destination. For our family, never light travelers, that meant counting and managing twenty-six bags plus my ancient portable typewriter: a galling chore throughout our journey.

The confetti drama of our departure from Pier 5 was an exciting event for the children and me. Unlike Bill, who had four years of seven-seas wartime travel in his history, this was our first trip away from our native continent. We weren’t bothered by the lack of ocean vistas from our quarters below the waterline. A quick climb up a few flights of stairs met that need. We easily adjusted to six tempting meals a day and to a full schedule of entertainment provided for children.

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Bon voyage, Susie, John, Anne, and Betsy

In that era, before the