Miss Demeanors

Setting is a conscious choice each author makes. I’m a “write what you know” type so I set my stories in and around San Francisco. It’s risky. I imagine New York-based authors and my Bostonian writer friends face the same risk. That risk is preconceived notions about the location. When I say “San Francisco,” what comes to mind? The Golden Gate Bridge? Fog? Fisherman’s Wharf? As someone who’s lived in or within spitting distance of the City By The Bay for most of my life, those images are rarely what I see. Okay, I do see the GGB, as we call it (because, really, who has time for all those syllables). My day job office has some pretty spectacular views and that’s one of them. But fog isn’t nearly as prevalent as it once was, thanks to climate change. And I, like most locals, need a reason to go anywhere near the Wharf. My San Francisco is different. The neighborhoods I frequent. The types of people I’m around. The City (yes, with a capital “C”) is almost like a character itself. Like other iconic cities, there are landmarks that never change. There are still pockets of the City of Dashiell Hammett. But it’s also constantly evolving. That’s one of the reasons it makes such a great location, that co-mingling of old and new, sometimes literally side by side. For the next couple of days I’ll show you real locations that inspire my settings. Along with my heart, San Francisco is a great place to leave a trail of clues. 

You’ll notice that in every picture of me from India, I’m wearing a puffy pink coat. That’s because I was freezing the entire time. It wasn’t actually that cold. Probably in the 40s. But there was no central heating. So whatever it was, it was, unless you could get a seat at the fire. How I came to appreciate fires! The central fire, and the hub of all conversation at the orphanage, was in an old mango tree that had toppled over in a storm.  We would all huddle together on a log and watch the flame. (I was huddling. Most of the kids were trying to jump over the fire.) My hair, my clothes, my skin all smelled of smoke. Periodically someone would go off with an ax and come back with wood, which they would throw onto the fire. Time passed in a different way than I’m used to. You could spend hours just chatting with the people who came and went. The coziest fire was in the library, in a fireplace. Here many of the kids congregated in the afternoon. (I should say that I was at the orphanage at an unusual time. For most of the year, the kids would be at school.) Here I played an intense game of Monopoly with Rampal (and we came in second). I was also introduced to a lot of good books, such as the Percy Jackson series. The most exciting fire was in the jungle. One night, we all crammed into a jeep and drove into the jungle, which was only about ten minutes away, but felt like an entirely different world. There was a huge vat filled with curry, that the cooks had been working on all day. Music was blaring. A lot of Justin Beiber. (It struck me funny that the kids used the flashlights from their iphones to navigate their way around the jungle, but ate food cooked over a wood fire.)  Then there was the fire I went to first thing in the morning. At 7:00, music would come over the loud speaker–uplifting hymns. Soon thereafter a girl would knock on my door. “Your tea, aunty.” Then I would make my way over to the kitchen fire, where Maya and some others were cooking the toast. I’d sit there and chat until it was time for breakfast.  When I got back to Delhi, the first thing I did was take a long, hot shower. It felt great, but I missed the warmth, communal and otherwise, from those fires.

When I arrived at the Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission, I was warmly greeted by a great cluster of children, each of whom hugged me and told me their name. A minute went by. Then came the first question,  “Do you remember my name, auntie?”  As a teacher, I have long known the value of remembering students’ names.  In fact, I make a practice of calling my students by name over and over again during the first few classes, because I believe that if you keep calling people by their names, other people will call them by their names too. They will remember the names, will become friends and the class will be a success. All of which is to say, I desperately wanted to remember each child’s name. But it was so hard. There were so many names to remember, and the names were so unfamiliar and even if I remembered them I didn’t say them right. Rosey and Shane and Gladys were easy to memorize. But then there was Roshni and Khushboo and Jyotika. I spent the first day fumbling around and everywhere I turned was a beautiful child looking at me and saying, “Do you remember my name, auntie?” That first night I thought a long time about the issue, and in the morning I had a plan. I went to breakfast (oatmeal over toast) with my notebook and I asked each child to write down his or her name with some distinguishing characteristic. Immediately they leapt in. Rampal wore a gray hat. Indro had a colorful hat. Ayushi had a puffy watch and Jyotika a scar on her chin. I filled up pages (one of which is in the photo). An orphanage is a communal place, and no one makes a decision on her own. There was much discussion over each person’s distinguishing characteristic. Was her nose unusual? Were eyes a particular color? Did she look like she came from Nepal? After that, every time someone came up to me and asked if I knew her name, I could at least pause and point to the notebook. It bought me some time and good will. By the time I left, I could pick out everyone pretty well, and since I’ve been back I’ve gone over all my pictures and written names on them to be sure not to forget. Just last Sunday, Rosey called me and her first question was, “Do you remember me, Aunty?” Yes Rosey, I remember you and Anthea and April and Raymond and Rampal and…”  

How I happened to go to India this past January is a long and convoluted story involving tragedy, triumph, stubbornness  and one very sweet young woman at an orphanage who I’ve been sponsoring for the last 3 years. Since I first began communicating with her, Rosey has been gently suggesting that I come for a visit, but getting to India is not an easy proposition. She lives in an orphanage 300 kilometers to the east of New Delhi, near the border with Nepal. To say that it is remote is putting it very mildly.   At first I planned to fly from Delhi to Pantnagar, which would have taken me somewhere close. But that plane only leaves 4 times a week. And it’s often canceled, which, in fact, it was. So then I decided to take the train. When you are going to India, many people have advice for you, most of it harrowing, so when I got to the train I didn’t know what to expect. (I should say that I had hired a guide to drive me to the station. He deposited me in my seat and said, “Don’t move.”) Fortunately, almost all the signs in India are in English. I knew that Haldwani, the stop I was getting off at, was second to last and that it was 5 hours away and that one of the men who runs the orphanage would be picking me up. With Rosey! Still, it is a little daunting to be a middle-class woman from Westchester, NY, with all that means, on a train going into the heart of India. The fabulous thing was that they kept serving food, and I kept eating it. There was cereal with warm milk. There was a very tasty vegetarian thing. Also very tasty desert, and tea. The Indian tea is the best tea I have ever had. Finally we got to Haldwani. It is not a metropolis. I stepped out and looked around and saw no one who looked like Clifton, from the orphanage, who I knew to be very tall, white and Australian. There was no one who looked like Rosey either, who I knew to be very small, beautiful and Indian. I felt a little like Cary Grant in that scene in North by Northwest when the cropduster is coming after him. I felt the teeniest surge of panic, except there was no way out. The next train back to Delhi would not leave for hours. So I followed the direction in which other people were walking and then I said a prayer and then lo and behold I heard a very tall Australian man saying, “Susan?” I had been found. And what an adventure I had. which I will relate tomorrow.