Adventures of Gerry

A Faux-Paus Averted
With the weather cooling down, life in Delhi got more bearable. Once we had the overall project strategy and scheme of activities worked out in GCP, there was the training and initiation of field work in all the participating states and Union Terrritories [UTs] that kept me and a few others busy with travel, feed back and changes. Some places, we had very good state collaborators either from the Planning Department of the state/UT or from an academic institution designated as our counterpart. In others, the quality was really poor, especially where the project was away from the state capital.
One such visit in the second year of the project was to the Davangere block of Karnataka state. Gerry, Prodipto, his wife Joya and I made the trip together. We flew to Bangalore and had a day or so there before going to Davangere by road. As we made a beeline for the city's famous silk shops in M.G. Rd. [was it still called South Parade or did it become patriotically renamed after Gandhi [as at least one road in each town was] soon after Independence?], Jaya exclaimed at a pedestrian crossing where the policeman held up the vehicular traffic to allow us to cross, 'What a civilized city!'. If only she could see it now! [there are places where such compassion for the poor pedestrian still is shown, but the overwhelming attitude of vehicles, with the traffic police looking the other way, is 'Pedestrian Beware!, there is POWER behind my wheel!'].

The Field Director of the Davangere project invited us all to lunch one day. Gerry managed to sit on the mat laid on the floor, in various poses from cross-legged to sideways, and still enjoy the food. However at one point, when a second round of pooris was, in typical hospitable fashion, put on his banana leaf without his even noticing, he was about to put it back into the serving dish. Horrified, I screamed, 'Gerry , don't do that!' Having succeeded in arresting his action, I explained that the concept of 'enjilu' ['joota' in Hindi, terms that may be interpreted as food or drink polluted by someone else biting or touching with one's hand that has been used in eating, or even placed on some portion of one's plate or leaf]. Told by the others too that if he had put back those pooris, the whole lot of them in the serving dish would hav e had to be thrown out, he was most bewildered. 'But how do I prevent them from just putting more and more food on my leaf?', he pleaded.

So we showed him how one crossed one's arms over the leaf when any second helpings came around, and even bent over the leaf protectively if the host was insistent. This incident reminded me of Seymour's lunch at Gopala's in Pune when we both came there two years before and he had tried to use his right hand to take an extra serving [the fact that it was quite clean literally was of no consequence – in the Indian purity theory, the spoon is only an extension of the hand, and once it had touched the mouth, the hand too was not 'clean' till it was washed after the meal!] .

Gerry's Introduction to Diwali
Another delectable Gerry story is the first Diwali in Delhi. The air was thick with rumours of impending conflict on our Eastern border with what was then East Pakistan. Still, Delhi was all sparkle and gaiety for days before. Prodipto invited all the project staff and their familes to his home for dinner a day before the actual festival. We were enjoying the fireworks and most of all the crackers too not me - as always, I was scared stiff of them and their noise!] from the terrace of his house, Suddenly, Gerry burst upon those of us who were already gathered on the 'Barsati' [open terrace on top – literally, the rainy place] yelling 'What has got into you Indians? I thought you were a peaceful lot! Or is the war already upon us'?

We burst in guffaws. Apparently, no one had thought fit to warn Gerry that while the actual meaning of Diwali was ' the festival of Lights', it was even more the festival of noise a la crackers and fireworks, not in some central controlled environment as on July Fourth in America but in every home, and nook and corner. Come to think of it, it did sound as if we were on the war front!

As we went into '72, our project staff, except the directors, got involved in an unsavoury incident of our own making. The third foreigner in our group, a young man called B.., had somehow irritated a lot of us, and we got together and wrote him a real nasty ote. I do not recall the sequence of events after that, but we all soon regretted our hasty and intemperate action, and we made it up with him. I believe the directors knew of all these happenings, and wisely kept out of it. For me, it was the third time, I had got into actions that left a bad taste in my mouth afterwards, and I made a fresh resolve that I would never again fall into such a mire again! This has been one resolution well kept.