VISITING JOHNSON CITY
I learned early in the week that Hasmukh Patel and his wife Manda would be in Johnson City this week. Hasmukh is the person who has arranged good experiences for Warren Wilson student groups visiting India over the years. His son, Mihir is a doctor who just moved from Johnson City, Tennessee, to Sacramento, California but still works one week a month as an administrator in Johnson City. This was his week in Johnson City and he brought his visiting parents along.
The day was cool and cloudless and the ride up over the continental divide of Appalachian Mountains was beautiful. I was driven to Johnson City by Becca Nestler, who was a participant in my last Warren Wilson College student trip to Sri Lanka and India in 2004. She returned on her own to Hasmukh’s Ashram in Virampur to stay for six months and has been back several times with her family so she is good friends with the Patel family.
We had a good visit with Hasmukh and Manda. Hasmukh invited me to spend a month at his Ashram when I can. He and his family are a wonderful Indian connection.
I grew up in India, spending cool winters in Allahabad with my family in a huge colonial era house with twenty foot ceilings and the rest of the year when the heat of the plains became unbearable attending Woodstock School, a missionary boarding school in Mussoorie in the lower Himalayas where it was cool in the summer. I am going to a Woodstock reunion, my 70th year anniversary, in Estes Park, Colorado later this week. Although I had Indian classmates at Woodstock I never got to know their families. In fact, I realize that I never really experienced Indian family life. I lived in an expat community at Woodstock and when in Allahabad didn‘t make any Indian friends. This didn‘t seem unusual to me at the time but now I realize that this was part of late colonial experience, white Westerners carrying the white man‘s burden.
But getting to know the Patel family and their extended family and coworkers at the Sarvodaya Ashram, founded and administered by Hasmukh Patel, has given me a chance to know an extended Indian family as friends. The ashram is based on Gandhian principles and has no hint of the common condescension of American organized missionary projects.
In fact my feeling at home with the Patel family and the coworkers at the Ashram removes any sense of being a rich American. I am certainly rich compared to the ordinary village family, but in connection with the Patel family I am the ordinary lower middle class American that I am when back here in Asheville. The wonderful wedding of Mansie Patel, Hasmukh‘s brother‘s daughter, that I attended with 4000 elegantly dressed upper class Indians three months ago which must have cost in the 100,000‘s of dollars, taught me that.
No condescension is possible now, in fact, now I almost feel. Invisible as I felt at the wedding taking spatial videos as the Patel family and friends danced around me. Now when I visit I am simply a friend who is learning about Indian culture from the inside, something that Woodstock School couldn‘t give me
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 