GORGEOUS GUSSIE
When my family lived in Allahabad where my father was the Principal of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, our long vacation was in the winter because Woodstock School, the missionary boarding school I attended was in the lower Himalayas at 7000 feet. There was snow in the winter and icy temperatures and the dormitory rooms and most of the classrooms were unheated. Summer vacations would have been very uncomfortable as well since the plains of India where most of our parents lived could have temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in June and August. So the school year ran from March to November, out of sync with the AMerican school year.
In February at the end of our long winter vacation the weather in Allahabad was balmy and the water in the almost mile wide blue Jumna river that just over the wheat field in front of our house was warm enough to swim in. So in late February every year my father would hire a wide sand barge, used to convey sand from the sand bars in the river to a staging area for contstruction work. The barge was swept off and for a long three day weekend we had mattresses place on the wood deck where we could sleep and night and then the boat was towed up the river by attaching a long rope to the mast and then one or two people pulling on the rope as they walked along a narrow path and towed us up the river. For our whole family it was an adventure.
Every mile or two at curve in the river there would be a sand bar extending out into the river. Sometimes parts of the sandbar were cultivated with cucumbers or other vegetables. But most of the wide sand stretch was available to play on and the water off the sand bar was shallow and safe for children to play in. We must have made five or six of these boat trips and for the last few we had an army surplus yellow raft that we took with us and played on. My parents mainly stayed an a shady portion of the boat and read or relaxed. Our cook cooked our meals.
I have two odd memories of these boat trips. One was a memory of a memory of a body washing up just below our boat on the steep muddy bank of the Jumna as were were loading up the matteresses and other paraphanelia for the trip. It was a body of a woman wrapped in cloth. On the other side of the river, several miles up river from us were the stone steps of a burning ghat where bodies were taken to be cremated with the ashes later deposited in the river. But some people with certain illness and women at certain times in their life were not permitted to be cremated. This was one of those bodies that was put in the river and then blown over to the other side as it drifted down with the current. There was a famous professional Austrailia tennis player who wore frilly outfits whose name we used for the corpse, Gorgeous Gussie. The large two foot wide river turtles and a flock of vultures ate her remains as we packed.
Another time when we had anchored at a sand bar and were running through the shallow water in order to dive in, I dove into, what I thought was several feet of water, but it turned out that the spot was very shallow with green plant growing in the very gooey soft mud of the bottom. I didn’t hurt myself but I came up covered with mud and when I wiped the mud from my eyes as I sat on my knees I saw a skull with purplish grey scalp with a few black hairs, the head only of a body. The rest had probably been eaten by turtles or vultures. I looked at the skull from two feet away, not frightened and not surprised. It is only looking back after living in the United States that this seems odd. To me it was simply a human skull in the river, floating from a cremation ground. But if I found it in the Swannanoa River below my house I am sure I would report it to someone.
But of course the best thing about these three day boat rides was that we made them as a family and that we had our parents undivided attention. They were some of my best experiences in India.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 