Return to India

Return to India

Six years ago Peter followed the traces of his parents on his return to India to track down his father's long -forgotten friends ...

When I was younger, my father wrote my name in Hindi Sanskrit on note. I thought it was a magical language from a fantasy country like Narnia or Lilliput and Blefuscu.

When I was older, I sat in front of the television with him and my mother and listened to him how he screamed over Michael Palin's last trips through the foothills of the Himalayas or the dusty streets of Rajasthan. "We have to go back," he said enthusiastically and turned to my mother. "The smells," he would say. "The colors," replied my mother. "We have to go back ..."

My mother and father lived in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, and still had to return to India between 1969 and 1971. My father, who had completed his studies and was unsure what he was supposed to do with himself, voluntarily contacted VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) as an English teacher.

My mother, a little less crazy, would wait a year and complete her studies before she came to him. There my father became friends with the locals - Satynarain and Radheshyam Joshi were two brothers who often appeared in his stories. The small town of Bhilwara was hardly more than a collection of buildings in the desert with a train station, a school and a post office.

There were only a few cars - if at all - and electricity was rare and unpredictable. He cooked his food and tea in a single Primus stove in his tiny apartment.

Alt = “Satyanarayan and Radheshyam Joshi”> Satynarain and Radheshyam Joshi - Bhilwara, 2008

My mother joined him and they lived in Bhilwara while my father worked out his contract in the local school. During this time they went on short trips through India before they finally said goodbye and returned to England.

That was in the early 1970s, so they joined the overland on the Silk Road and crossed Pakistan before they are traveling through Afghanistan, Iran, Turkeynach Greece and further through Western Europe.

They came back to England without enough money in their caft assets to take the bus to the house of my grandparents in Bexley, and thus went through the wet and dreary streets in southeast Londons.

During my entire childhood and youth I listened carefully to the stories of my parents about India and their trips: My father chased a train from Delhi in which he was supposed to sit while my mother was sitting alone and wondering where he was going - my mother was just a few hours in India!

stories of my mother, who exchanged rupees with men dressed in Kalashnikow in Kabul, and my father, who was ill in Lahore, were also often retired. It was these stories that filled me with wanderlust.

After completing my degree in 2006, I started to travel Europe for short breaks before I explored Asia for myself with a trip to China. Then I decided to go to India at the end of 2008. To Rajasthan and Bhilwara - to find the city and the people behind the stories.

to be honest, I would never really have expected to find them. I thought I could find Bhilwara, walk around and ask a few questions, take a few photos to show my father how much it had changed, and that would be about everything I would achieve. I had nothing but a passport photo of my father from the seventies and a few letters he had received from friends a long time ago. I had the address of a school that no longer existed, and a few names of people who may have been alive or not.

alt = “My father in 1970 ″> my father in 1970

When I had arrived and checked in a hotel, I jumped into a tuk tuk and asked the driver to take myself to school where my father had worked. It no longer existed, but the driver asked a few friends and soon found out where the new school had moved.

at noon we arrived at the Shree Mahesh School, where I went out and just stepped through the school gates in time to see how the new school beginners arrived for the semester. After I had explained countless employees, I met the headmaster and was asked to stay for lunch together with the hundreds of new students!

In the end I cut off much better than I would have expected. On Christmas morning 2008 I called my father from Bhilwara around 7:00 a.m. I said good morning before handing the phone to my hosts Satynarain and Radheshyam Joshi.

"Hello Geoffrey", they called. "It was a while ago, my friend." That was actually - about 38 years since they had spoken to each other. They were back in contact and stayed in contact with what the way for a real reunion in 2013 paved.

five years later I almost went to the same threshold of the same house in Bhilwara almost to the day, but this time I followed my father into the house. But that's a different story and another blog post.
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