Return to India

Return to India

Six years ago, Peter returned to India to follow in his parents' footsteps to track down his father's long-forgotten friends...

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

When I was older, I would sit in front of the television with him and my mother and listen to him scream about Michael Palin's final journeys through the Himalayan foothills or the dusty streets of Rajasthan. “We have to go back,” he explained enthusiastically and turned to my mother. “The smells,” he would say. “The colors,” my mother replied. “We have to go back…”

My mother and father lived in Bhilwara, Rajasthan between 1969 and 1971 and were yet to return to India until 2014. My father, who had completed his studies and was unsure what to do with himself, volunteered with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) as an English teacher.

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

There were few, if any, cars and electricity was rare and unpredictable. He cooked his food and tea on 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 made short journeys through India before finally saying goodbye and returning to England.

This was the early '70s, so they joined the overlanders on the Silk Road, crossing into Pakistan before making their way through Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, to Greece and on through Western Europe.

They returned to England without enough money in their kaftan pockets to take the bus to my grandparents' house in Bexley, and so walked the last few miles through the wet and dreary streets of south-east London.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I listened intently to my parents' stories about India and their travels: my father chased after a train from Delhi that he was supposed to be on, while my mother sat alone on board and wondered where he had gone - my mother had only been in India for a few hours at the time!

Stories of my mother exchanging rupees with Kalashnikov-clad men in Kabul and my father suffering from malaria in Lahore were also frequently retold. It was these stories that filled me with wanderlust.

After graduating in 2006, I began traveling Europe for short breaks before exploring Asia with a trip to China. Then at the end of 2008 I decided to go to India. To Rajasthan and Bhilwara – to find the city and the people behind the stories.

If I'm honest, I never really expected to find her. 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 was about all I would accomplish. All I had was a passport photo of my father from the 1970s 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 or may not have been alive.

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

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

At midday we arrived at Shree Mahesh School, where I disembarked and walked through the school gates just in time to see the new entrants arriving for the term. After explaining myself to countless staff members, I met the principal and was asked to stay for lunch along with the hundreds of new students!

I ended up doing much better than I ever expected. On Christmas morning 2008, I called my father from Bhilwara around 7:00 GMT. I said good morning before handing over the phone to my hosts Satynarain and Radheshyam Joshi.

“Hello Geoffrey,” they called out. “It’s been a while, my friend.” That was actually it - about 38 years since they had spoken. They were back in touch and stayed in touch, paving the way for a proper reunion in 2013.

Five years later, almost to the day, I crossed the same threshold of the same house in Bhilwara, but this time I followed my father into the house. But that’s another story and another blog post.
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