NOVEMBER 24, THURSDAY

YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN

When Susie and I were in Varanasi, India, in March of 2012 we decided to go to the city of Allahabad and visit where I had lived during my grade school and high school years when my father was Principal of the Allahabad Agricultural Institute, a college for training Indians in better agricultural practices and management. I was mainly interested in showing her the house where I had lived during the winter months when I wasn’t away at Woodstock School, an American missionary boarding school in the Himalayan mountains.

The point of this post is that everything changes with time or put another way, you can’t go home again. My house was still there with the shape still the same with the same neem trees in the front yard and the same flat chabutra or the brick equivalent of a deck off to the side in a garden. And inside the 20 foot ceilings were still as high with the same large curved arches between the living room and the dining room and the rooms on either side, bedrooms and an office before, still there.

But instead of simple teak furniture that my father had a carpenter make and a piano in the corner and large pots holding long stemmed white fluffy grasses in the arches between the rooms everything was bright yellow and orange with overstuffed furniture and fake bricks and Jesus everywhere.

The current Principal was a born again Christian, a self proclaimed Bishop, and an evangelist with a radio station on the flat roof. The Presbyterian college had been founded by Sam Higginbottom who later became Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. But Presbyterian missionaries were very circumspect about offending Hindus and very reserved in affirming their faith.

But it turns out that in India then and even more, now, sectarian tensions are growing and being a Christian evangelist is risky. So there were guards guarding the house and around the edge of the yard where we used to have a view across the wheat fields to the wide, blue Junna river workers were building a twelve foot high protective wall.

But we were foreigners at the end of the British Raj and this is the new India. So who am I to judge. But the visit was a shock to me and I haven’t gone back since nor will I. You can’t go home again.