Bwanas and Sahibs

My brother Geoff is an amateur tiger conservationist, and he and I were talking the other day about a recent New Yorker article I recommended he read. It concerned a telegenic American couple named Mark and Delia Owens, whose passion for African elephants seems to have gotten out of hand. 
     Perhaps that is putting it mildly, as there's evidence that their troubled son shot an unarmed poacher to death as an ABC News team stood by, that Mark may have retrieved the body and dumped it into a nearby river, and that at least a portion of the ABC crew went along with the coverup.


There's less debate among conservationists than you might imagine about whether or not it is justified to shoot poachers on sight, especially when they're carrying AK-47's, and especially when whole species are being hunted to extinction for their parts, including several on which Chinese men are apparently willing to spend millions of yuan to avoid taking Viagra.
     But as Geoff and I got to talking, we returned to a beef we both have with Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and PBS, when it comes to nature documentaries. We were brought up on Mutual of Omaha's Animal Kingdom with Merlin Perkins, and Walt Disney's Truelife Adventures, and both of us recognize the extraordinary improvements that have been made to the genre. 
    We are agreed that no-one ever wrote a better documentary script than David Attenborough, and we thrill to the footage intrepid teams of cinematographers have captured for such series as Nature, Blue Planet and Life, including, recently, astounding images shot through falling snow of that most elusive of cats, the snow leopard, dragging its kill up a rocky Himalayan slope.


But our complaint is with the producers of a lot of other wildlife documentaries who, like the writers of historical romances set in exotic places, center their stories around white people instead of the real heroes of animal conservancy: local game wardens and animal conservationists. 
     With little remuneration and no fanfare; at risk to their lives; and often in defiance of their own governments; they are the ones who strive most courageously to sustain the world's wildlife. And yet, at best, they are relegated in most animal documentaries to bit parts: as loyal guides and faithful sidekicks to the sahibs and bwanas who come rolling in from L.A. with their film crews, safari jackets, lomotil, and little bottles of Purell: peppy, entrepreneurial, self dramatizing young people who have narrowly chosen animal conservation over skydiving or bungee jumping.
     We know of a few steadfast indigenes who have been featured, notably Geoff's friends Fateh Singh and the late Billy Arjan Singh, both tiger wallas of irresistible charisma, and I suppose a producer would argue that Western viewers need someone on the screen with whom they can identify. But it seems unfortunate and shortsighted to neglect the real heros of animal conservation and to understimate our capacity to identify with them.

Love Letters in the Sand

Before my grandmother died in 1976, she left instructions that my father burn all her correspondence with my grandfather. So when we found their love letters in an old trunk in the basement, my father duly consigned its contents to the flames.
     Both of my grandparents Ward had spent their childhoods haunted by scandal: my grandfather's father had embezzled millions of dollars as a financier on Wall Street: so many that the family is somewhat affronted that the sort of pyramid fraud Ferdinand Ward refined has been named after a piker like Ponzi. By rights, it should be known as a Ferd.
     Before he was sent to Sing Sing in 1885, my great grandfather had put large dents in several fortunes, and utterly ruined former President Ulysses S. Grant, whose son he had finagled into becoming his partner. It is to Ferdinand Ward that we owe Grant's military memoirs, which he wrote in an effort to dig himself out of debt.
    My grandmother was the daughter of Daniel Otis Eshbaugh, the President of New England Loan and Trust, who apparently committed his company to a disastrous investment. Temperamentally ill suited to the rough and tumble of turn-of-the-century commerce, he could not bring himself to face his Board of Directors and jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry.
     Our family has fled from commerce ever since. But my brother Geoff has long been at work on a book about Ferdinand and his father, an almost equally odious Presbyterian minister, and I have always been fascinated by the mysteries of my ancestry. Geoff is an historian and I an erstwhile one, and we generally deplore the instinct among families to jettison their ancestors' correspondence. Researching various books, each of us has followed the trail of a cache of 19th century correspondence, only to be told by the latest heir to some family's archives that it was destroyed or discarded.


My father-in-law was a pathologist, and, upon meeting my father for the first time, handed him his monograph about his research into coccidioidomicosis, a disease peculiar to California's Central Valley. My father, who was not a man of science, duly opened the monograph and read the following passage: "The practice by laboratories of pouring pus down drains is to be deplored." 
     My father was at a momentary loss for words. But my father-in-law's point was that this was a great waste of pus: of material others could put to use in their research. I guess Geoff and I feel the same way about the ancestral record, no matter how rancid it may be, and recall the disposal of our grandparents' correspondence with grief.
     Recently my mother has begun to go through her correspondence with my late father, who, like his mother, left orders that it all be destroyed. Reading it, however, has brought my father back to life for her, restoring him from the difficult and confused old man he was when he died, to the dapper, brilliant, loving young man she married.
     My belief is that we all have a right to destroy any of our inanimate possessions, and keep private whatever intimacies we deem unsuitable for children. But not necessarily from the grave. 
      My father's instinct was always to clam up, to not make any sort of fuss or display that anyone might construe as egocentricity. When his children volunteered to write something for his mother's memorial service, his first response was, "I don't want to turn this into some kind of Ward family dog-and-pony show." But in the end we prevailed, and he loved what we had to say about his mother. Though his objections were sincerely felt, it was not always clear that they were sincerely meant, for whenever we overruled him he seemed glad we did.
     I come from an unusually happy family. My grandparents not only loved each other but enjoyed each other's company, as did my parents, as do my siblings and my mother's grandchildren and their spouses. It's really quite a family, and owes a lot to the standard my father and mother set.
     It seems to me that some future generation might like to understand the source of such felicity, to learn from my parents' love letters that such happiness was not accidental, but took nurturing, respect, wit, persistence, fidelity, patience, and a lot of coaxing into the light. 
     So with all due respect to my father, I have urged my mother not to yield to his extravagant reticence but to grant my parents' descendants admission to their courtship.

Chanakyapuri

Ever since we Wards returned to the States in 1959, our old house in New Delhi has been the object of periodic family pilgrimages.  A perk of my father's appointment as the Ford Foundation's Educational Consultant to the Union Ministry of Education, it stood in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi's Diplomatic Enclave, on what were then the outskirts of the city. 


Set in a kind of compound with a horseshoe driveway of red quartz, an expanse of parched grass and dusty hedges, and a complex of servants' quarters in back, in its whitewashed stucco glory it looked something like the stacked upper decks of a small ocean liner, with duplexed semicircular verandahs on each end. Behind us stood a dairy, directly across the street lay a large empty lot frequented by snakes, enormous lizards,  and jackals, and a few hundred yards away lay a ribbon of empty boulevards that the Government of India had cleared and paved to make way for rows of prospective embassies.


I first returned to India as a photographer in 1968, and as the beneficiary of my father's rise in the Ford Foundation, I actually had the opportunity of living there again for a few weeks as sole sahib. The house was much as I remembered it, and no fresh refugee from art school ever landed on softer upholstery. Some of our family's old servants -- to our astonishment, eleven had greeted us when we arrived from the South Side of Chicago in 1954 -- were still around, and it had not changed nearly as much as I had. Living there again as a young bachelor evoked some curious sensations for me: nostalgia, certainly, but also a weird sense of abandonment, as if the family had somehow left me behind. Where was my mother when the cook came in to go over his accounts? Where was my father when my driver asked where I wanted to go? Why were my brother and sister's rooms empty? I felt like the young heir to an extinguished dynasty, and when it came time to make way for the next educational consultant, it was almost a relief.


Another ten years passed, and I returned to research a novel. The day after the night I landed, my first stop was the old house, where I hoped to photograph a papaya tree my sister and I had planted. I imagined that it must have achieved the stature of a sequoia. 


By now the Ford Foundation had handed the house over to the Government of India which, in turn, had bestowed it upon the Government of West Bengal to serve as a rest house. As the local caretaker graciously escorted me around, I heard for the first time the whispering of mortality that twenty years later hisses in my ears like tinnitis. The verandahs had been enclosed, the living room divvied up into bureaucratic warrens, and the covered terrace my mother had constructed had collapsed. And as for the papaya tree, all that remained was a rotted stump.


On each of my subsequent trips I vowed not to put myself through that ordeal again, but the four years I lived there had been the happiest of my childhood, and I always surrendered to its gravitational pull. On my next trip five years later I was allowed into the kitchen my mother had overseen with Switzer vigilance. Here she had lectured the servants on germ theory, and her beloved cook Amiya had worked from recipes from her own frayed copy of the Joy of Cooking. 


It was late morning when I stepped through the dining room doorway and into the kitchen's once pristine, white-tiled precincts, and interrupted perhaps fifty large rats in their scramble for crumbs from the morning's preparations. One ran over my foot as I staggered back through the doorway to the verandah, where, years before, our bearer had organized a vigil by servants and neighbors of every imaginable faith to pray for my recovery from encephylitis. That's it, I told myself. Never again.


These revisits began to sap my appetite for Delhi itself, whose population had quadrupled since my boyhood. My old haunts had been subsumed by the bustle of what had turned from a kind of vestigial memorial to British Rule to a major world metropolis choked with motorized traffic. The old republican zeal of the 1950s seemed to me to have succumbed to a corrosive cynicism, and the city's best minds seemed focussed primarily on the best way to make money.


If all this strikes you as the grousing of an old man for the old days, the unseemly and perhaps nostomaniacal whining of an overprivileged chota sahib for all the deferences that devolved upon us in post colonial India, you are not entirely mistaken. Of course the population would grow, and the city with it, and my house would not survive in all its pristine glory. It was not a museum to our brief residence in it, but had turned into something else entirely, as had Delhi, as had much of India. 


If my disillusionment extended beyond Delhi, it was only to North India, as I had never been south of Bombay. But this past February, I traveled around South India with my wife's cousin, the sculptor Robert Taplin, who'd been after me to lead him on a tour of Indian temple sculpture. Suddenly I found myself in an India I could discover on its own contemporaneous terms, and by the time I had circled back to spend a few days in Delhi, my affection for India had been so thoroughly restored that I decided to risk another tour of the house, this time with my brother Geoff.  


So off we drove from the house he was renting in Golf Links to our old neighborhood of Chanakyapuri, along streets so changed that we were practically through the gate before I knew where we were. Where we were turned out to be a construction site, for apparently the West Bengal government, having been forbidden by the municipal authority to tear the old house down, had decided simply to subsume the old place in an engulfing structure straight out of a nightmare: a great brick and mortar maw with stairways seemingly leading to nowhere. 


We stumped around the premises for a while, revisiting my old bedroom, and my parents', and Geoff's, and going up to the roof where we once set out a stuffed owl one afternoon and watched as dozens of crows and vultures and kites attacked it. The house next door, once the Japanese consulate, was still in pristine condition. But everything else had changed. The dairy was now an army encampment, and the house on the other side of ours, once the home of our father's boss at the Ford Foundation, was surrounded by walls festooned with barbed wire. Half the kitchen had been entirely and perhaps mercifully closed off, and the construction had overwhelmed what little had survived of the terrace. 

Geoff and I gloomed around the house like ghosts, and we were pretty desolate by the time we got back to his apartment. After a couple of stiff drinks, we promised ourselves we would never go back. But that besieged old place is like a kind of gauge that indisputably measures -- should we sometimes lose track -- the inexorable passage of time. Besides, though there are not yet any rats in our kitchens, the house is probably not doing much worse than Geoff and I. After all, no-one has seen fit to encase us in a protective shell. The Delhi Municipal Authority would have no objection to tearing us down. So I doubt it's a promise we will keep.