India-40 and the Circle of Demons: A Memoir of Death, Sickness, Love, Friendship, Corruption, Political Fanatics, Drugs, Thugs, Psychosis, and Illumination in the Us Peace Corps

By Peter S. Adler

In 1966 and 1967, when he was twenty-two years old, Peter S. Adler did a two-year stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in a village called Khed halfway between Mumbai and Goa and not far from the Arabian Sea. He and his roommate built schools, killed rats, and helped start poultry businesses. It was a life-changing, coming-of-age journey. But death, sickness, corruption, love, friendship, political fanatics, drugs, thugs, psychosis, and personal palavers with a foul-tempered god, who only he could hear, were part of the story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543421170

Peter S. Adler

Peter S. Adler, PhD is a planner and conflict resolution expert and is the author of numerous articles and three previous books: Beyond Paradise (1993), Oxtail Soup for the Island Soul (2001) and Eye of the Storm Leadership (2008). Adler lives in Honolulu and works nationally and internationally.

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Prologue

Colorado, 2009

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A few years ago, I was at a party with a dozen colleagues from the Keystone Center headquartered in the mountains of Summit County Colorado. One wintery Saturday night at Ben and Janesse’s house, we engaged in some viciously competitive Scrabble games, then I called in an order to a local pizza joint. It was snowing hard—fat, wet flakes slicking up the roads and piling into drifts—so I asked them to be delivered to Ben’s place.

I heard the guy put the phone down and yell to someone inside: Yo, dude, can you deliver some pies over to Dillon? There was a muffled discussion, some rattling around, then he came back on the phone and said, No way. The delivery guy is way too stoned to drive. They made fine pizza, so I deiced the car windows, drove over, picked them up, and came back to the party.

More Scrabble ensued along with a hard-fought game of Risk that turned into a titanic battle for Madagascar. Then late in the evening when the chaos, jubilation, and despair of tabletop combat died down, someone turned to Aaron Murray, a bearded grizzly of a man, and asked him what his life had been like when he was in the Peace Corps in Africa.

Aaron, a biologist, talked about being stationed in Uganda in the 1990s until a civil war broke out and his whole Peace Corps group was expatriated to Nairobi. At the time, other Peace Corps volunteers near the Congo and Rwanda were also being evacuated owing to rebel activity. The north above Lira was also off-limits because of incipient threats from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Then the East turned violent because of cattle raiders near the Kenyan border.

Peace Corps moved him around, and at each post, Aaron tried to teach the basics of conservation before Peace Corps finally sent him home early. He talked movingly of gorillas, elephants, and rhinos. That’s life, I thought. No good deed goes unpunished, including the Peace Corps.

Then someone asked him, Did you like it?

Aaron’s face melted into the memory, and he said ever so wistfully, It was the journey of a lifetime.

Later, someone casually asked about my own time as a PCV back in the more Precambrian period of the Peace Corps, well before Aaron. I gave them the short version. I was assigned to a construction program in India while the war in Vietnam was raging with the vague idea of making some kind of a constructive difference in a world on fire. I had a great experience and would strongly recommend it to others.

What I didn’t talk about were the shadows of my departure, initiation, and return. How could I? What if you set off on some determined but poorly defined adventure with no clear idea of what you were doing or why? What if you were running from fuzzy and out-of-focus troubles that you couldn’t quite understand? And what if suicide, all manner of illnesses, and political crazies were all part of the story side by side with some personal palavers with a foul-tempered God whom only I could hear?

I also didn’t mention the misfits, miscreants, draft dodgers, and people with entertaining personality disorders that I trained with or the work program the American and Indian governments negotiated that never materialized. Nor did I talk about my own character flaws or the times themselves—the late 1960s. So I simply enjoyed the evening, stuffed myself with pizza and beer, and echoed Aaron’s sentiment: it was a life-bending fork-in-the-road experience.

Those are the bones of the matter, but these darker stories need telling alongside the moments that were all sweetness, radiance, and otherworldly windows into our souls.

Keats said writing is a form of prayer. Actually, it’s a complete self-indulgence and vanity—a hobby. Among the diminishing remains of Peace Corps Group India-40A, Bill Lapham builds computers, Ted Riley messes with motorcycles and a studio-quality printing press for his art, and Dick Harris fly-fishes and takes photographs. Our now departed comrade Peter Van Zile used to fart around with woodworking and brewed some homemade beer that looked and tasted like soy sauce, though he took great pleasure from it. I write for entertainment and diversion from the more adult responsibilities expected of me.

What follows is about growing up through an unexpected and idiosyncratic expedition. Paul Simon sang it like this:

A man walks down the street in a strange world, maybe it’s the Third World;

He doesn’t speak the language;

He holds no currency;

He is a foreign man;

He looks around and sees angels in the architecture, spinning in infinity …

He says Amen! and Hallelujah! ¹

That is what happened to us.

Part I

Departures

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1.

Wanderlust

Chicago, 1965–66

The ice thaws, choices contract, and I am itchy to get the hell out of Dodge.

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In Chicago, the shift from winter to spring is painfully slow. Why can’t it all happen on a single day instead of over weeks or months? I know the answer. The world doesn’t work on my clock, and nature doesn’t negotiate. I hate that. I want to be omnipotent.

Meanwhile, buds are sprouting on the oaks and sassafras. An early robin is poking her beak into icy, muddy grass. Lake Michigan is frozen. Out in the garage, I’m working on the 18½-foot Carter Craft called the Blue Eagle, named for my parents Drs. Blau and Adler. Blau means blue. Adler means eagle. The city needs to thaw and the ice still has to break, but when it’s warm enough, we’ll trailer the boat to Jackson Harbor and moor it for the summer. Meanwhile, it’s sanding and patching the dings, putting a fresh coat of copper sulfate paint on the bottom, and changing the plugs in the engine.

At school, I changed my major from biology to history and English. Roxanne says this was stupid. Still, my best classes at Roosevelt University are in the humanities and social sciences and, best of all—a complete surprise—Irene Schwartz’s bonehead art history survey. I gritted my teeth, girded my loins, then loved it: the first cave drawings of bisons and wolves all the way to Jackson Pollack’s drunken splatter paintings.

In our study group at Philosophy 310, Sammy Smith, me, Sewell the Bird, Laurel, and the perpetually melancholy Alfredo went to the Pancake House to decipher Professor Stull’s strange instruction: Tell me exactly why good is better than evil.

Bird said, Good and evil are just figments of our imaginations, so it doesn’t matter. We are animals.

Sammy said, It’s about power, how we apply it, the ends to which we put it, and the means by which we deploy it.

Laurel chimed in, Easy to say for you guys, but if you don’t have any power, it’s all bullshit.

Alfredo quoted Hemingway: Being against evil doesn’t make you good.

I told them to stop dithering. It has to be one or the other, so let’s get on with it.

Still, I’m not that confident. Everyone has what they think are clear and correct rules for everyone else’s life. Some make sense, but none tell me how to live or what to live for. I’m trying to assemble mine from books: Dune—a future history about feuding planets, the politics of empires running amok, and worm monsters in the sand; One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—deviance, resistance, rebellion, and death; Catcher in the Rye—confusion, anomie, ennui lurking in the shadows; The Old Man and the Sea—life pared down to fundamentals. I want to write like that, spare, lean, crisp but still vibrating. In fact, I want to be like that. Hemingway’s fundamental rule: survive and write to tell about it.

The following week at a pickup football game in the park at Eighty-Seventh and Jeffery Avenue across from Chicago Vocational School where Dick Butkus played, Sammy slammed me down to the ground hard—bruised rib and bent thumb. He’s a shrimp, but he is Mighty Mouse, built like an anvil with arms like tongs. I’m out with injuries. My career hopes with the Blackhawks or Bears are finished.

Even with the snow melting, Chicago is dirty, hostile, and a relic of another age. I know summer will bring a few soft days and nights with iridescent fireflies and migrating monarchs. Still, most of the time, it’s hot summers and freezing winters spiced up with industrial pollution, race riots, corrupt politics, and now, an unwinnable war that gets more and more absurd. I want to see the world. Kerouac in On the Road said that because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, he kept rolling under the stars, smoking dope and keeping a journal.

But hard choices are closing in. Roxie wants commitment. Wants to get domestic. She is curvaceous, raven haired, hot-blooded, lovely to the eye, and powerfully ambitious. Maybe I could spend my whole life with her, but I’m quietly wondering what this all would look like down the road. Unclear. She needs things orderly and planned. I am more for drifting on an outgoing tide with lines in the water, catching whatever circles up to grab the bait.

The war also looms larger now. When Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong invade Portland or San Francisco with Kalashnikovs, I’ll be the first to sign up. Mahoney, Mossbacher, and some other guys I went to high school with have already enlisted. But Vietnam is a pointless sinkhole—part of an imagined geopolitical domino theory cooked up by generals and politicos who have their own personal reasons for picking a fight. We call it the Vietnam War. They call it the American War, a continuation of a five-hundred-year old beef with the Chinese, the French, and now us. Why? What do we win if we win? World War II—that was different. Nazis and Japanese were the kind of aggressors I understand. They were bad guys. We were the good ones.

So I joined the demonstration. Mom, being protective, was on me. I could see the fear in her face. Said I was nuts. They are too powerful. They will hunt you down just like Hitler did to us. Then after a pause: And by the way, I don’t like those friends you are keeping—Mahoney and those guys. Lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas.

I always know a lost moment just after it has happened. Listening to Mom having a rant was one, but there were others. Dad helped me line up a job as wiper, rust scraper, and painter on a Lake Michigan ore boat. Would have spent the summer back and forth from Chicago to Duluth, bringing iron aggregate from the Mesabi Range to the Wisconsin Steel mill to be turned into International Harvester tractors and trucks. Got sick just as it was time to pack and go. Doctors said it was polio. It wasn’t. It was flu. Would have liked to be on the water all summer. This is what they mean by missing the boat.

Then Cosby, my advisor, said, You have an interesting problem, Adler. You don’t know if you want to live in the world of action or ideas, plus you are lazy.

Why do I have to choose? I lazily asked.

Because life will force you to.

I could see his point and but could also feel the hot breath and beady eyes of the draft board on my back. Trotsky said, You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.

At the career fair that Cosby suggested I go to, I wandered from table to table with Rox looking at different futures. Talked with some banks, General Electric, and Dow Chemical—people who make Agent Orange but also a toxicant that kills lamprey eels in streams before they enter Lake Michigan.

Then farther down the row were the graduate schools: Berkeley, Cornell, MIT, and other places I can’t get into. Then the Coast Guard, Marines, Navy, Border Patrol, and Peace Corps. Coast Guard is a possibility. Peace Corps sounds good if they’ll let me go to South America and meet Che Guevara. Border Patrol is off my list. I’d let everyone in. So is South Chicago Bank. Flunked accounting.

That night, Roxanne, Sewell, Marlene, and I went to see Doctor Zhivago then went out to the deli on Seventy-Third for corned beef sandwiches—fat delicious piles of cured meat on rye with brown mustard, dill pickles, and coleslaw and a lot of big talk about a movie with a giant story. Roxie and Marlene were mooning around: it’s all about Lara, ephemeral love, love found and lost. Sewell: it’s all about the Czar, revolutions, counter-revolutions. Me: it’s all about right and wrong.

Some days later, a letter came from the Coast Guard. Please tell us why you want to join us in 500 words or less.

Dear Sirs:

I know about boats. I almost worked on a Lake Michigan ore freighter. We also have an 18-½ foot epoxy plywood boat with a 50-hp Evinrude outboard that is underpowered but that I maintain every winter. I can make my way on water. I know how to use radios. Plus you once saved my mom and dad when their steering cable broke on Lake Michigan and you towed them to shore and thereafter my mom baked Viennese vanilla crescent cookies every Christmas and I delivered them to you. Remember all those cookies? I am Red Cross certified as a Water Safety Instructor and I like the idea of rescuing people and protecting the Great Lakes from Nazis, Commies, and gangsters. I’m a good swimmer.

Your humble and obedient servant, very truly yours, etc. etc.

Days later, Peace Corps asked the same question, and I gave them a slightly modified answer. I like Kennedy’s big idea, I said. Young Americans doing something more constructive than gunfights with skinny little men and women in Vietnam.

The next Sunday afternoon, I went to Alfredo Mora’s house for dinner. Big family. Immigrants—like my folks, only our family is small, just the last remnants of Moravian, Hungarian, and Austrian Jews, and some odd Christians here and there. Alfredo’s family comes from Sicily. His dad has a shoe store. We had salami, olives, cheeses to start, then pasta, wine, salad, and ice cream.

Late in the afternoon, we escaped, went bowling, bought beer, and sat in the park drinking out of paper bags. Alfredo was fixated on Moby-Dick. He loves Melville’s prose. Loves the white whale and loves Ahab. It’s some impersonal force, he said. God. Life. Death. Fate. We are all chasing white whales, he told me.

What are you going to do after we get out of school? I asked. What’s your white whale?

Travel, he said, then come home and do something.

Shoes? I asked.

Fuck no, he said. You?

Make the world better, I told him. Maybe Peace Corps or Coast Guard.

He said, Live in hope, die in the mud—that’s what my people say.

Gloomy bunch, the Sicilians. Then again, everyone around the Mediterranean flattened them repeatedly. But America really did need a new face and a better set of hands. Roxanne thought I was crazy. Alfredo hated the US government. How can you think of working for Lyndon Johnson? He’s a prick.

But I had to confront the choice: stay or go. Mark Twain: Courage is mastery of fear. Hemingway: Courage is grace under fire. Alfredo: Courage is living with the aftermath of the big shit mess you just made.

The following week, Cosby had a class discussion and read two poems by Anonymous. We had to read along. First, something in old stilted language from Beowulf:

So it becomes it a youth to quit him well with his father’s friends, by fee and gift, that to aid him, aged, in after days, come warriors willing, should war draw nigh, liegemen loyal: by laudd deeds shall an earl have honor in every clan.

Then this by some Midwestern farmer:

Carnation milk is the best in the land. Here I stand with a can in my hand. No tits to pull, no hay to pitch. You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.

Now compare and contrast, said Cosby. He asked us to do these baffling exercises all the time. No hands went up. I was as low to the floor as I could get, inspecting my shoelaces. Adler! he barked.

Well, sir, only thing I can think of is both writers were too embarrassed or scared to put their names to them.

People laughed. Cosby snorted, You’re a dolt. Turned to Sewell who gave a long, wordy explanation that made no sense whatsoever. Cosby grunted again. You’re an idiot too, worse than Adler. The right answer, he said, is they have nothing in common other than being poems, and some might argue neither of them are that.

Then, in today’s mail, my grades arrived along with a tiny paycheck from my job washing gigantic pots and pans at the Roosevelt University cafeteria. If I were a cannibal, I could cook an NFL linebacker in one of them with plenty of room for onions, carrots, and potatoes. But the cafeteria was not a bad place to work. The fry cooks made me scrambled eggs if it was morning and a burger and fries if it was lunch.

Then letters come from the Coast Guard, Peace Corps, and Navy. Thanks for your inquiry. We need more information about …

2.

Froth and Churn

Chicago, 1966

The US convulses with social and political turmoil from a pointless war and notables gather at my house to discuss the matter.

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That’s how it was when I and forty-nine other freshly minted, pink-faced college graduates signed on for our two-year stint with the Peace Corps in 1967 and 1968. Our group was called India-40, the fortieth to be placed in India, part of 4,325 to serve on the subcontinent before the entire India program was unceremoniously dumped in 1976. Roughly translated into Hindi, Peace Corps comes out Shanti Sainik, something self-important and noble like the official Force for Peace. Many of my Indian friends innocently pronounced it Piss Corpse.

I lived in a town named Khed, a place of 6,500 people halfway between Mumbai and Goa in a region of Maharashtra State called the Konkan. The weather in Khed vacillated between hot and dry and tropical wet and cold. I went there with a brain full of rigidly dualistic categories as if the whole universe came down to the zeros and ones that make computers work and as if you had to be one or the other.

My more or less post-adolescent world was made up of friends and enemies, good people and bad, young and old, those for the war or against it, normals and abnormals, and people who were smart (me and my friends) or stupid (everyone else).

I cherished and made good use of these categories and assumed such orderings were essential to everyone’s existence, but India carved a new groove into my head. In the process of doing this, it also became an escapade full of odd adventures and encounters, invisible forces, and strange moments of disequilibrium. I gleaned lessons that reverberated into my current life, but that only began to acquire a rough sensibility looking back.

Sociologically, the story begins in the rumble of the 1960s and the amplifying turmoil in America. The world was lighting up in a small campfire that was about to turn into a massive, out-of-control conflagration. Today, if I talk about this to millennials or the X, Y, or Z generations, I get that stupid cocker spaniel look—head cocked sideways, eyes puzzling over what you are trying to tell them but wanting to understand. I might as well be discussing the Turko-Hungarian battles of 1526 for all they know. Most of it is just too remote.

Looking back, I am convinced that much of what happened to my comrades and me stemmed from a unique intersection of psychology and history best described by psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton.² In our tempestuous era, we suffered from undefined confusions and bundles of personal turbulence that ricocheted into larger events and then zoomed back in to amplify further angst. A vicious or virtuous circle (or both), depending on how you look at things. Circle of life or way of the world—others might say.

Armed with emerging research from brain science, I now know that my own wits weren’t fully formed. I’m told the youth brain of delayed American adolescence encourages recklessness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Maybe it’s a way of ensuring that some people die young and don’t contribute to the gene pool. Regardless, a youth brain is only a partial intellect, less than fully functional and not that good at gauging danger and exercising judgment.

We smaller creatures of that era created the bedlam around us and then, finding it enjoyable, frolicked in it. Our growing up was fashioned in the post–WW II 1950s. Take my parents. They were refugees, thin as rails and permanently haunted by the doomsday machine that was Europe in the 1930s and early ’40s. They were the first to get advanced degrees and the few in their families who got away. They were cunning enough to evade Hitler, came to Amerika, worked hard, and wound up with a clean house, a couple of Studebakers, and enough food, clothes, toys, and school supplies for three little boys.

There were the usual psychodramas of growing up, but our lives in America in the 1950s were pleasant and innocent compared to most everywhere else. Gas cost twenty cents a gallon, haircuts were thirty cents. Postcards cost three cents to mail, a McDonald’s hamburger was fifteen cents, few married women worked, and the American Dream was continuously on display by The Mickey Mouse Club, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and Leave It to Beaver.

As the ’50s morphed into the early ’60s, you didn’t need to have a college degree to see that stormier weather was brewing. I experienced it as a vague social undertow, a set of currents and tides and personal complexities that were yanking me away from the moorings I knew. Bob Dylan said it well: Something’s happening here but you don’t know what it is.

With hindsight, I now see the shape of it. My Piss Corpse comrades and I were part of a seventy-million postwar baby boom born of the Greatest Generation. With Germany and Japan in tatters, the new enemy was Russia. Sputnik and the race to plant flags on other planets were on. Nader’s raiders were going after unsafe cars made in Detroit. They bypassed the rusting ’54 Oldsmobile shitbox I was driving and focused on the shiny ’64 burgundy-red Chevrolet Corvair convertible with wire wheels my father bought on a lark and which I borrowed all the time because I was sure it was a chick magnet. Nader said it was a death trap, and the ladies ignored me.

Action in Vietnam was also accelerating and inhaling kids from my high school and college, mostly poorer kids who couldn’t elude America’s foreign war against Hanoi. But that wasn’t the only change. Elvis Presley came back from army duty in Germany but the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, and the Kinks eclipsed him. They were making a new kind of music none of us had ever heard before, one that spoke to the snark and alienation of the moment.

One hundred thousand people my age descended on San Francisco during the 1967 Summer of Love to trip out on acid and listen to Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, Gracie Slick, and Jefferson Airplane doing gigs at the Fillmore and Cow Palace. They were wearing tie-dyed bell-bottoms and singing The Age of Aquarius from the tribal rock musical Hair. The concert halls were filled with the pleasant smell of cannabis.

Freedom Riders were being killed in Mississippi, race riots were erupting in Watts, and sit-ins were being staged at lots of white joints, including the Peter Pan Restaurant in my neighborhood at Seventy-First and Jeffery. In Berkeley, Mario Savio started the free speech movement while Ken Kesey and his school bus full of goofballs were taking to the road following in the sandy tire tracks of a slightly older beat generation that included Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsburg, and Gary Snyder.

Kennedy and Khrushchev had a thirteen-day Mexican standoff that damn near blew the top of the world off. Historians now tell us we weren’t minutes away from a holocaust but seconds. A gunman with a fairly ordinary rifle killed Kennedy. Then Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. Birth control pills became legal. Men landed on the moon. Women’s skirts shortened, men’s hair lengthened, waistlines expanded, everyone got crankier, and America’s political morass thickened.

Hundreds of thousands marched in civil rights demonstrations that birthed the Black Panthers. Hippies gathered at Max Yasgur’s farm forty-three miles from Woodstock then gravitated west to the Haight in San Francisco. Women, blacks, college students, American Indians, Asian Americans, Mexicans, midgets, old people, and anyone else who felt marginalized all proclaimed his or her hitherto submerged identity and demanded a seat at the American dining table.

It was, on balance, a great time to be alive.

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If I could have invited a bunch of people over for a conversation back then, I would have staged a big salon-like gathering to have a good discussion with some notables of that era. After I posed the ever-pertinent question What’s going on? here’s how some of the conversation might have gone:

About then at my imaginary party, a few others would show up.

First, my calabash uncle Gershon, a roly-poly, sensible, and very successful seafood importer from Highland Park, Illinois, whom I was especially fond of. Peter, he would say with gravel-voiced gravitas and a wry smile, don’t listen to these people. They are passing fads. Go get educated, get a job, settle down, find a wife as sweet as your aunt Ethel here, and start a family. Time enough for all this political bullshit later. In fact, you can come work for me.

Which I seriously thought about. In my teenage years, I was always hanging around rivers, lakes, and ponds, wanting to get near an ocean, writing letters to Jacque Cousteau pleading for a job and waiting for a reply. Working with seafood sounded good.

Then, some of my college buds would swing by—Sewell Gelberd, Sammy Smith, and Alfredo Mora. Sammy would say, We stopped by to get you on our way to the Pancake House. We’re hungry. Sam, a tightly constructed package of granite muscle and springy ligament, was always hungry. And then another one of my high school cronies, Tom Mahoney, a man of infinitely odd humor, would pop in to tell me he was enlisting and headed to Vietnam and might I want to buy his VW bug?

Eventually, Timothy Leary would drop acid in the punch bowl, Bob Dylan would sing Forever Young, my parents would walk in and have some, and we would all leave for the Pancake House. Amid all the conversation about Give peace a chance! and Why can’t we all just get along? we would take the joint over and feast on bacon, eggs, and waffles.

It would have been a repetitious and probably tedious conversation, ephemeral, highly vibrational, dizzying with profound conversational chaos but with some big emptiness in the middle of it all. Still, the right word at the right moment opens doors to other possibilities later on. Somewhere in all that gobbledygook, I first heard the words Peace Corps.

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That was how it was—heady, overstimulating, a complete sensory overload with all manner of grand ideals, huge egos competing for limited airtime, and multiple psychopathologies masquerading as social issues. Everyone was talking at each other, over or past each other, not listening, just restlessly pronouncing, boiling with rage and revolution, hungry for some sort of change in the bigger and smaller orderings of things. Deep shifts seemed to be underway, but I had the nagging sense that somewhere amid all this static and white noise, truer signals were around if I could just find them.

In my narrow little universe back then, the south side of Chicago was Dodge City, a bustling, corrupt cattle town in Kansas in the mid-1800s that attracted saddle-worn working cowboys with herds of Texas longhorns. It also brought drifters, gunslingers, missionaries, gamblers, whores, and phony doctors selling tonics—all of them trying to separate real cowboys from their paychecks.

Some of these riffraff were not unlike a few of those gathered at my house. Many Dodge City parasites were escorted to the city limits or shot by local sheriff Wyatt Earp when they resisted. Others, noticing the Colt .45 pistols the Earp brothers used, got a sudden urge to see California.

In the late 1960s, I felt it too, something similar. Itchy pants. I didn’t know if I was a deportee, migrant, immigrant, or refugee but I needed to get the hell out of Dodge. Possibly, it was genetic.

Lee Child, who writes potboilers about an oversized former military policeman, has a theory about people who wander. Back in the Pleistocene, he said, when we were still becoming human but lived in caves, there was the inevitable danger of inbreeding—kids with extra eyeballs, missing limbs, or partially formed heads. They became the slow ones who couldn’t keep up. Every generation or so, though, a gene clicked in that made at least one person get out of their cave—their Dodge—to fraternize and mingle with other gene pools keeping everyone’s offspring a bit healthier and fitter.

That may also be partly why I jumped out of my own small domestic bonfire and into the high heat and vast sprawl of India. Peace Corps was my delivery vehicle to a different way of being.

3.

The Dirty Dozen

Honolulu, 2013

The whole truth and nothing but the truth about Lyndon Johnson and Indira Gandhi is finally revealed.

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The nom de guerre of India-40A was the Dirty Dozen, self-anointed near the conclusion of our tour (even though there were actually only eleven of us left). Aside from appropriating the name of a great movie and not being able to count, we were one of the odder assemblages of people I have ever known. More on that soon, but first, you need to understand something about our political genealogy.

Every known human group has an origin story that explains its own creation and how they became the people. Most start with some version of In the beginning, there was darkness … The Hopis believe the Infinite Creator had his nephew gather specks of matter from the vast emptiness of space and time to make the nine solid worlds. The Koran says, He created man from a clot … Jews say Yahweh made the land, but it was dry until a mist came up, and he then shaped wet dirt into a man and breathed life into it.

This last explains how my people got here. Alternatively, the Japanese believe that three great but invisible deities called the Spirit Master of the Center of Heaven, the August Wondrously Producing Spirit, and the Divine Wondrously Producing Ancestor made men and women, which explains how Carolyn Watanabe got here. And here is the India-40 primal myth that explains how the Dirty Dozen and 1,500 other Peace Corp volunteers suddenly came to India in 1967 as part of the infamous PL-480 Wheat Deal.

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On an early spring day in 1966, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was ushered into the White House Oval Office with Mahendra Singh, her chief of protocol; Krishna Rao, Government of India’s ambassador to the United States; and Mrs. Gandhi’s chief aid, Horace Tata. They were welcomed by Angus Lockwood, assistant undersecretary of state for India, then greeted warmly by Chester Bowles, America’s ambassador to India. A moment later, Lyndon Johnson entered through a well-polished oak side door.

Madame Prime Minister, said the president extending his hand, it is a great pleasure to see you here and to welcome you to the White House.

The pleasure is mine, Mr. President, she said, trying to let go of his hand, and I look forward to your own visit to New Delhi soon.

A waiter in a starched white tunic and perfectly creased black pants rolled in a cart with drinks. Glasses, an ice bucket, soft