Preface

This book is about the life of Dil Das, a North Indian villager who was born in the lower ranges of the Himalayas. Although Dil Das spent most of his life as a peasant farmer raising buffaloes and selling their milk, and was poor by almost any standard, most of the stories he told were not about everyday life, but about great adventures. Shooting tigers and leopards with kings, princes, and politicians; trekking into the high Himalayas with missionary families; traveling to Nepal to join an American friend in building and running a luxury resort in a wildlife refuge; and endless tales about friendship and hunting that seemed to have nothing to do with culture as such, but a great deal to do with the history of colonialism. What I have set out to do in this book is make sense of this very local, very personal history of colonialism and the relationship therein between culture and a biography of encounter. As such, this book is about the problematic, intimate interface of difference in the postcolonial world. It is about the meaning of friendship between Anglo-Saxon Protestant missionary men and a low-caste Hindu peasant, people who, if left to their own devices, would be regarded as coming from worlds apart, even though they spent most of their lives together.

Since I am a son of a missionary, and a long time friend of a low-caste peasant, as well as an anthropologist who has conducted field research in the village where Dil Das was born, this book is also about the problematic interface of ethnography and colonial or postcolonial encounter. It deals directly with the moral ambiguity of writing and living in a field of power where, despite intimacy, self and other are not equal; where the legacy of colonialism relentlessly undermines the praxis of friendship, and where a condition of friendship makes anthropology, if not impossible, at least morally violent. This book is, therefore, about the limits of friendship and knowledge; about the way in which missionary lives defined a structure of power in which Dil Das lived, through which he spoke, and, I think, as a consequence of which he died. This book is, [++Page xii Preface ] therefore, about both the heroics of representation and the tragedy of encounter.

As I recorded Dil Das's stories, and in subsequent reflections on his life, I came to realize that it was impossible to make sense of him, to write his story that is, in terms of any standard ethnographic categories. One could read his life in purely ethnographic terms, and extract from it pieces which, when fit together, would make sense in terms of peasant life in North India, caste hierarchy in North India, social change in North India, or some other phraseology of social science. But this is not the point. That some might blithely engage in such an endeavor is the point of my contention, for Dil Das simply did not clearly stand for any discrete social reality -- regional, national, historical, or ethnographic. He defied classification, and my efforts at classification seemed to undermine precisely that which made him human. Moreover, as I experimented with various methods of representing his life, it became clear that I could not extricate myself from the text without doing a great deal of violence to his narrative. In telling stories about himself, Dil Das was telling stories in which I was directly implicated, not as an ethnographer but as a family friend.

Because Dil Das tells his story to, through, and with missionaries, a word is in order on this category of person. In North India in general, and the town of Mussoorie near Dil Das's village in particular-but also probably everywhere -- there are missionaries and there are missionaries. Some are blinded by faith and preoccupied with their own spiritual convictions, but there are others who, while deeply motivated by their beliefs, are more concerned with resolving worldly problems. They have profound faith in the prospect that, in the end, the human spirit will prevail. Among missionaries such as these there is little talk of salvation, as such, and even less preaching per se, but there is a deep, undying faith in basic human goodness. Most of the missionaries Dil Das encountered and befriended were of this kind, some more radical than others, but all involved in social work and reform of some sort. And so there are few if any religious undertones to the stories he tells. There is no search for God. There are, however, very strong humanitarian overtones.

And it is here, despite the virtue of goodness and faith in human kindness, where I see a problem of moral ambiguity and political impropriety. I see a problem in the work of social reform, development work, and various kinds of community service that are predicated on the universality of human experience in a starkly differentiated, hierarchical world where inequality and injustice are constantly reproduced. I take it on faith, following Nietzsche and Foucault -- as well as Marx -- that we create our own history, but we do not live the history we create. And so the larger consequences of our actions are hardly ever manifest in the [Preface ++page xiii] specific goals of our intent. As good-intentioned, liberal, often radical humanists, those of us implicated in the stories Dil Das told are fundamentally "nice people," if such a normal category is able to exist in a world whose postmodern logic makes self-definition virtually impossible. However, there is also something fundamentally wrong with the consequences of our actions.

Had Dil Das been the target of a successful evangelical project, it would be easy and perhaps reassuring to squarely lay the blame and clearly define the criteria of condemnation. Had he been obviously exploited by landlords or alienated through the interests of venture capitalism, one could voice any number of clearly articulated protests, and chart a clear course of action. Had he only been an outcast, and simply been made to suffer the stigma of oppressive untouchability, it would be easy to envision an alternative world of justice and equality. But when inequality and injustice are intertwined with friendship, and when extreme differences in wealth, power, and status are, in some sense, the criteria of intimacy, rather than its undoing, one is dealing with a very different animal. This animal appears tame and docile enough -- even friendly -- but is, in fact, more dangerous in spite of itself, and for that very reason. I can only ask those of this species who are explicitly implicated in this book to realize that my intention is not to blame or "bad name" anyone, but to in some way come to terms with a problem of moral justice for which I feel directly responsible; a beastly problem of justice which elides the civilizing rhetoric of human virtue.

What I have written is based on Dil Das's memory, Dil Das's imagination, and my own situated knowledge. Contrary to what anthropology requires, and what good judgment demands, I have made absolutely no attempt to corroborate anything Dil Das said about other people. I am sure that much of what he said is true. I am also sure that he fabricated a great many of the stories in which many of his friends figure prominently. While I make no apology for what I have written, I must apologize to those people in Dil Das's life -- Ernie Campbell, Ray Smith, and John Coapman in particular, Dil Das's boyhood friends and fellow hunters; to Robert C. Alter and Ellen Alter, my parents, Stephen Alter and Andrew Alter, my brothers, and by extension my whole family; to Ratnu, Sheri, Rukam, and Tara, Dil Das's brothers; to Azad and Sunder, his nephews; to Abloo, Tulasi, and Jankhi, his uncles; and to his last wife Rani Devi and daughter, Gura. I have no doubt that John Coapman, Ray Smith and Ernie Campbell in particular would remember the things they did with Dil Das in very different ways.

With regard to my own situated knowledge, I fully concede that I have, in some sense, appropriated Dil Das's voice and have translated a heroic autobiography into a biography that seeks to communicate more [++page xiv Preface] than just a life story. If Dil Das had had his way, for example, the title of this book would be simply Tiger. But that would have led to entrapment and capture, to a fiction of untamed freedom, or, worse still, to extinction. The story I have written is, therefore, a story of half-truths, partial knowledge, and inevitable distortions. In this sense it is based on and reproduces hearsay rather than eyewitness. As such, following the epigraphs from Alberuni and Barthes, it suggests a different way of seeing more truly whole realities.

The structure I have imposed on Dil Das's narrative is completely contrived from start to finish. Therefore, it is particularly important to present, at the outset, the research method I designed to produce Dil Das's narrative, a history of my analysis of the narrative text, and a brief genealogy of my thinking on the subject as a whole.

During the summer of 1985 I spent three months at my family's estate in the Himalayan town of Mussoorie, and at Dil Das's home seven kilometers away in the village of Pathreni, recording the stories Dil Das told about himself. I told him that I was interested in recording his life, and then captured everything he said on tape. I also kept a journal of what else we did, which included going on hunting trips, attending weddings, participating in ritual events, dropping in on friends, and walking to town to pick up supplies.

Dil Das's style of narration was enigmatic to say the least. It was often very difficult to know when he was telling a story -- as opposed to just talking -- and virtually impossible, at times, to disentangle beginnings, middles, and ends. He would often indicate when he wanted the tape recorder on, and was always aware of the machine's presence. So it is possible to say that Dil Das's discourse, no matter how rambling and disengaged, was always, or at least almost always, consciously and thematically structured. Nevertheless, I recorded long passages that, when transcribed literally, read like a rambling collection of words, half sentences, and exclamations and made little sense. Many of the more readily comprehensible tales are pithy, devoid of context, and frankly anecdotal. And yet, at times, Dil Das told very coherent stories that are easier to understand and locate within a biographical framework. Even so, these biographical fragments are often so full of intimate (as opposed to local) knowledge that they would be virtually incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the larger context of our fused lives.

In response to my stated goals, Dil Das told me the story of his life, but each story was clearly a unit unto itself -- or else a meandering flow of consciousness -- and there was no discernible chronology or logical progression to the tales he told. Significantly, however, the stories were narrated while we were either sitting in his home or walking through the mountains. It was, more often than not, the basic geography of the [Preface ++page xv] forest around the village of Pathreni that gave the narrative a degree of coherence. It was our happenstance encounter with people, places, and things that triggered Dil Das's memory and thereby evoked a narrative structured by random nouns of the present rather than by history, life, or identity. When Dil Das told a story, I grunted, nodded, and otherwise showed that I was following the conversation, but I did not speak. Again, contrary to good ethnographic method, and perhaps even good manners, I did not ask questions or seek clarification. When he was not telling a story, we rarely if ever talked about the project.

Transcribing Dil Das's narrative was extremely difficult, and the exercise has contributed to my skepticism about the relationship between knowledge and truth. Although Dil Das was a master storyteller, it was difficult to produce a meaningful translation of stories that seemed caught halfway between memory and speech. To be sure, I could have sat down with Dil Das and clarified certain points. I could have asked him any number of things in order to start making sense of what he said while he spoke. But I wanted him to come as close as he possibly could to writing and that required a much higher degree of strategic silence than dialogic engagement; all of which may seem counterintuitive, but then again participant observation is precisely ambiguous on the critical point of communication.

I divided the 30 hours of narrative into 185 more or less cohesive tales. I translated each cassette tape, and then worked over each story numerous times in order to capture the meaning and flavor of the original telling. I then read through all the stories, in conjunction with my journal, in light of my memories, and experimented with various methods of classification. Early on I realized that chronology was not a very useful mode of organization. To follow the sequence of Dil Das, who told particular stories on the basis of what geography brought to mind -- a rock here, a vista there, a chan (hamlet or cow shed) in the valley -- was simply too enigmatic. In the end I organized the stories thematically. Then I went back to the original narrative text and merged the shortest, least coherent tales into congruent longer ones, and cut out a large number of redundancies. This left me with roughly one hundred stories, about 80 percent of which dealt with hunting.

My original goal in recording Dil Das's narrative had been to present Garhwali peasant culture through the eyes of one man, and so even in the early stages of translation, working in 1985 I was still not fully aware of the effect of Dil Das's commentary on my life and our shared past. I was, however, painfully aware of the fact that his story of hunting was not very useful, or noteworthy, as a document of culture. After Dil Das died in 1986, I had reached a point from which I could see no return, and not much future, so I put the project away [++page xvi Preface ] I started rereading the stories again in 1992, this time from a completely new perspective. Rather than look for culture, I saw that Dil Das was talking against culture in order to produce what I am calling a hybrid history of encounter. From this viewpoint I could make sense of the narrative precisely in those terms which had earlier seemed to render it useless -- his ambivalence toward dairying, his obsession with hunting, and above all his celebration of friendship. I have used these thematic categories to organize Dil Das's life story, but I have not selectively included stories in order to exaggerate the significance of certain themes.

Much as I would have liked to, it would be impractical to publish all the tales Dil Das told. I have therefore included about half the stories, primarily those which are least enigmatic and most coherent, while still keeping the basic thematic ratio of the original collection intact. The stories, therefore, are chosen on the basis of their own merit to provide a focused biographical synopsis. These are a representative sample of what I collected, and many of them are stories Dil Das told over and over again.

However, given the fact that my family and I figure in a significant number of the stories Dil Das told, I have chosen to include most of these and exclude those stories that refer to characters who appear far less often. This limits the number of personal names that come into play, and provides coherence, critical focus, and continuity to Dil Das's story of encounter. It should be abundantly clear that I have chosen to write about myself and my family for no other reason than because Dil Das chose to bring us into his narrative.

In translating Dil Das's life story into some kind of comprehensible, public knowledge I have strategically played with the context of meaning, played with what both Dil Das and I could take for granted. I have done this in order to entertain, to make sense, and also work out -- in an autobiographical way -- where exactly I stand in relation to the subject of this biography. On one level, though, I am just doing what Di1 Das always did -- spinning a good yarn in order to have some fun, make some sense of things, enjoy life, and pass the time. By extension I am fulfilling an obligation by writing a book I had promised to write. But it is a book that also, I hope, broadens the appeal of these stories, defines their context, and gives them permanent form -- a kind of immortality about which I have ambivalent intimations. But as Dil Das often pointed out, "whatever else is said about anyone, good must be said about him. Something, anything good must be said on his behalf. Then, even when he dies he will stay alive."

* * * [Preface ++page xvii]

This book is composed of four parts, whose titles are taken from the poet Tulsi Das's epic Ramacaritmanas. Part I, Bal Kand, the Book of Childhood, focuses on childhood memories of hunting in and around the American community of Landour, the village of Pathreni, and the hill station of Mussoorie. Part II, Aranya Kand, the Forest Book, deals with the time in Dil Das's life when he and John Coapman traveled and hunted together. Part III, Shram Kand, the Book of Labor, concerns the relationship between hunting, hard work, and the transactions of dairying in a petty-capitalist economy. Part IV, Uttarkhand, seeks the confluence of caste, class, colonialism, and friendship. Part I deals with boyhood adventures, Part II with a kind of forest exile, Part III with a return home to reality -- if not Ayodhya per se -- and Part IV simply with the perils of Himalayan life. Throughout it is a battle with demons and a search for something lost, as well as a devotional hymn of sorts. Parts I, II, and III each contain three chapters. The first chapter in each part is my reflections or background on some aspect of Dil Das's story. The second chapter in each part is a collection of stories told by Dil Das as I have translated them. Each part concludes with a short essay by me. In Part IV, Chapter 10 is in Dil Das's voice, and Chapter 11 is my reflections on the themes raised in Dil Das's life story.

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Part I
Bal Kand
THE BOOK OF CHILDHOOD

Chapter I
Dil Das-Enslaved Heart

Dil Das was a poor, low-caste, Himalayan peasant who defined himself, heroically, as a hunter of animals, and as a close friend of the missionary children he hunted with. I knew Dil Das progressively well from the time I was about ten as the son of American missionaries working in North India, until his death in 1986 when I was twenty-nine and he was about sixty.

Our families go way back, as they say -- almost three generations. My grandparents and parents knew Dil Das and his father as dudwallas: men who delivered milk to our community. I knew Dil Das and his family first when I was growing up in North India between 1958 and 1977, and then, from 1980 on, as an anthropologist.

Dil Das was born in the Garhwali village of Pathreni about seven kilometers to the east of Mussoorie, a resort town or hill station, which gained prominence and jaded notoriety as a place for elite recreation and gay entertainment during the era of British imperialism. He was the son of an illiterate, untouchable basket-weaver who migrated south to the Himalayan foothills from a village near the source of the river Ganga. I was born in Mussoorie, in the Landour Community Hospital. My parents were among the American missionaries, who, for the past seventy years or so, have been, in various ways, associated with Woodstock, a Christian boarding school at the east end of town. Because Woodstock, and the people who went to Woodstock as teachers and students, came to play a central role in Dil Das's memory of himself, I must begin the story of a Garhwali villager by describing a rather strange permutation of Western lives.

I grew up in the curious, postcolonial environment of Landour where the culture was, until the late 1970s, equal parts North American mid-western Christian and British colonial. Woodstock, which largely defines this culture, was, for all practical purposes, an American prep school where one was far more likely to read Chaucer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Poe than the great Indian poets like Valmiki, Mira, or Tulsi Das be- [++Page 4 Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood] fore being graduated to attend college in the United States -- anything from Baptist bible college in the South to Ivy League university in the Northeast.

Academic conformity notwithstanding, it is hard to describe this environment exactly, because it was not what we thought it was. Imagine 350 predominantly white middle-class Protestant missionary children -- and a large minority of elite, Westernized Indians -- both groups born and raised in small out-of-the-way places and trying to be, in some way, and with various degrees of consciousness, American, while at the same time either unclear, critical, or simply confused about what being American meant. Who we were (and are, I suppose) is not so much people caught between two worlds, as people who are condemned to conceive of ourselves in terms of something that we are not; reluctant Americans who played basketball, joined the Boy Scouts and went trekking, listened to Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles, crowned May queens, and danced around the May Pole. We read Hemingway while taking Christian Endeavor retreats to a place called Satya Narayan, which means "God's Truth," and learned Christmas carols in languages our friends "at home" spoke in order to entertain grandparents who lived far away. We wore Levis and T-shirts, bell bottoms, tie-dyed kurtas, and Nehru jackets. And yet whenever I visited America (and even now after twenty years) it seems like a foreign country. It is all the more alien because it is supposed to be, in some fundamental way and despite extreme emotional ambivalence, home, that place that Woodstock sought to define but simply could not be because of where it was. Its location, 280 kilometers north of Delhi on the first range of the Himalayas, to be exact, was, less precisely, in a highly mythologized India. We imagined ourselves to be strangely yet concretely part of this India by virtue of birth and language on the one hand, and environment on the other -- that which is born from the epic, utopian union of Father Land and Mother Tongue.

As an international school, Woodstock prided itself over the years on its multicultural environment. Growing up in this environment I took for granted that this pride was well founded. We did, after all, come into close, long-term contact with people whose "culture" put our own into critical perspective. For many of us English was not our first language. But looking back, it now seems that we had somehow convinced ourselves that our unique cross-cultural perspective on things was characteristic of an unbounded global world view when in fact it was simply a measure of our idiosyncratic modern insularity. Our "exposure" to different things was fairly complete. Along with the ritual priests at the Kedarnath temple, the lines of beggars at Rishikesh come to mind, as do the shepherds with their massive, barb-studded steel-collared bho- [Dil Das -- Enslaved Heart ++page 5] tiya hounds, who herd flocks of sheep and goats down out of the alpine meadows into the lower valleys not far from the school. But "difference" as such was never really allowed to break down the fundamentals of a culture which, despite the input of people from all over the world, was strictly defined by a Christian world view and incipient First-World modernism.

Leaving aside, if I may judiciously employ Dil Das's profanity of choice, the narrow minded input of "sister-fucking evangelicals," perhaps there are some for whom Woodstock's liberal humanism has provided a global perspective, an international identity nervously compatible with the transnational nature of postmodernizing culture-and it is here where I would like to pay my debt. But it is also, and despite its best intentions, a provincial parochial place that has given birth to a form of shallow, sentimental Orientalism in which India, as a romantic ideal, fills a deep void left by our emotional ambivalence about being people without an identity. This Orientalism is not exactly the same as that which evolved in the purely imperial imagination and colonial experience of men like Sir Richard Burton or T. E. Lawrence. Our image of self and other was scaled down. It was less magically epic and more mystically intimate, but still implicated in the production of monumental difference.

Many of us who went to Woodstock enjoyed hiking, and the environment of the Himalayas is well suited to this form of recreation. Treks to particular mountains, springs, lakes, and rivers -- Nag Tibba, Smith's Hole, Deodital, and the Aglar -- would follow trails which, because they were meant for more practical and less leisure purposes, often led to and from villages. And so I suppose it is not surprising that these villages became, for us, part of a timeless, picturesque, natural landscape, named, to be sure, and populated by people whose names were often known, but experienced anonymously in purely aesthetic terms. In wood smoke and cow dung, carved wooden pillars and slate roofs, homemade water pipes and women'sjewelry, even the wrinkles on an old man's face, or his calloused hands spinning wool into yarn, there was a curious melding of sensuality, knowledge, and intimate strangeness. In the 1970s we would have called it funky (which is, as one of my teachers rightly pointed out, a good "ethnographic" term). The everyday things of the people in these villages evoked, in those of us who lived in another world not far off, a sense of mystical intimacy with difference. There was also a sense in which this funky experience of the rustic, "grungy" character of the villagers came to represent, I think, some kind of basic Christian desire for that which was essentially good and uncorrupted in everyone. Not in so many words, of course, for that would break the spell, even for those of us who had critically secularized a faith we could not lose, but I think [++page 6 Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood] there was something about "camping out" in a humble cow shed-along with the ox and the ass, if you will -- which, by bringing a search for self and God together in the imaginary, exotic space of village India, undermined the history of industrial progress -- the spirit of capitalism, if you will -- with a kind of passionate, discursive humanism, while giving to the obliquity of our Western, or Westernized lives, a certain meaningful significance.

On the surface Woodstock school and Pathreni village are worlds apart in every way, and yet it is in terms of Woodstock and his encounter with "alienated" Protestant missionary children that Dil Das tells his story. It is in this way that I, among others, am implicated in his narrative. And, symmetrically speaking, as an anthropologist with an incriminating past, I have implicated Dil Das in my own narrative by having chosen to tell my stories, both intellectual and personal, through an encounter with him and other Garhwali villagers.

But narratives are never whole realities, nor do stories always capture the truth. Sometimes narratives make reference to a reality about which nothing or very little is ever said, even though it is regarded, by all concerned, as being of fundamental importance. In Dil Das's case this unspoken fact of life -- a cultural fact of immense importance, to be sure -- was the absence of a son. He tried for many years to ensure that his name would be carried on. He only gave up hope for good when his third wife was diagnosed with cervical cancer, the same disease that had killed her two predecessors. But while holding on to hope, and then when giving it up, Dil Das did not speak about his failure. In fact, being without an heir was of so much significance that it did not need to be articulated. It simply was the single most important fact of life in an otherwise fictional domain of experience. It stands, therefore, in some sense, as the signified -- the eyewitnessed but unspoken -- of all the signifiers that follow. Much of what Dil Das did can be explained from this point of reference, for without a son he was both the object of pity and self-recrimination, but also more or less free to live for the moment, and for himself, rather than required by convention to invest in the future. However, the absence of a son also made Dil Das into a storyteller, a raconteur reflecting on the past rather than one looking to the future. And perhaps in telling stories to me he was talking to a son, of sorts, and also perhaps thereby constructing a legacy.

Dil Das knew, of course, that I was going to write a book about our conversations -- his stories about me and mine about him. He had, I think, a great deal of fun telling these stories. And there is no denying the fact that he also derived -- as have I -- a great deal of satisfaction, and a feeling of enhanced self worth, from the project of writing as a whole. But he did not know, fully, how he would be written and read. And so, [Dil Das -- Enslaved Heart ++page 7] behind the heroic bravado and pure joy of "having lived a good life," as he put it, there is in Dil Das's voice, I think, a deep sense of self-doubt end pain -- born of being poor and outcaste, of having not produced a son, of having been widowed three times, and of having wandered too far from home -- that compelled him to spin a good yarn and take so much pride and pleasure in being something he was not quite. For my part I do not fully understand the implications of having written Dil Das out of a framework of pure friendship and into the ambiguous complicity of a text that promises more than simply a new perspective on us and them, me and him, being here and being there, by looking closely at the intimate questions of self-doubt that are born of encounter.

Dil Das was more than willing to narrate his life experiences since he prided himself on being a master raconteur. However, what gave him license to speak, as it were, was the fact that he was "unemployed" during the summer of 1985, and was not looking for work. His income came from a contract he had to deliver milk to the kitchen at Woodstock School, and he subcontracted this to his younger brother in exchange for a regular stipend. In any case, Dil Das was never too concerned with the routine of work and labor, and had, as we shall see, a rather ambivalent attitude toward his role in the peasant economy. All of which is to say that he had both the time and inclination to talk at great length with me about his past.

One of the reasons I originally wanted to record Dil Das's life was that he seemed to clearly represent a certain configuration of power. I have said that he was inherently impossible to classify, a point that I will explain momentarily, but he did, on the surface, appear to fit neatly into a network of labels generated by colonial and postcolonial discourses alike: intellectual, linguist, secular humanist reformer, Marxist, and post-structural cultural critic. These labels seemed to fix his identity in terms of the larger workings of the empire and its academic, administrative, national heirs. In these terms Dil Das was a Pahari, a person from the hills and mountains of northern Uttar Pradesh. By virtue of the language he spoke-among friends, family and neighbors-he was also a Garhwali. As an Auji or Baijgi, he belonged to a caste of drummers and musicians who also weave bamboo baskets. By virtue of this caste group's position in the hierarchy of other such groups, Dil Das was also an outcast; a stigmatized untouchable. Officially, therefore, he was a Harijan; a "child of god" in the apologetic nomenclature of modern, secular India and a Dalit in the Ambedkarite language of opposition to this nomenclature. Because of where he lived and what he did, as a tiller of the soil, he was a poor peasant who owned a small parcel of unproductive land. Consequently, he was a member of an exploited, disenfranchised underclass -- a classic subaltern. [++page 8 Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood]

Given the weight and specificity of these myriad labels, one must legitimately ask what I mean by claiming that Dil Das defies classification. I mean that Dil Das resists these modes of classification. He tells a story that dismantles this configuration of power, a story of self against society while caught in a web of normative social facts. Ignoring the terms of caste and class, stigma and poverty, language and place, Dil Das called himself a skikari: a hunter. For him hunting was an obsession, an all-consuming passion that defined his identity. Significantly, he shared this obsession with a number of young men from the American missionary community in Landour, in particular Ernie Campbell and Ray Smith, but above all others John Coapman

I do not know when Dil Das first started hunting. It must have been when he was a young man, around 1947. However, it is very clear from the stories he tells that he soon began to identify closely with the young men from Woodstock School who came to the forest around his village to shoot pheasant, kakar (barking deer), gkoral (mountain goat), and leopard. To a degree in fact, but most significantly in Dil Das's memory, hunting merged his and the missionary boys' identities, and thereby superseded and rendered irrelevant all differences of class, caste, nationality, religion, and language. The intimate experience of hunting together radically decentered the prevailing structure of power and provided a means by which Dil Das could redefine himself outside the framework of normal classification.

The curious thing about hunting is that it seems strikingly incongruous to the encounter of missionaries and peasants, neither of whom are, in any sense, typical hunters. The political economy of hunting does not seem to make sense in terms either of an agrarian mode of production or a calling to save souls. Quite apart from blood sport as such, as a vocation, as a mode of production, and as a way of life, hunting is not particularly loaded with cultural meaning in twentieth-century North India. That is, it does not so much define a specific category of person as an arena of passion and infatuation. Precisely because of this, however, it does provide an alternative framework for self-perception and the construction of identity. Which means that when the sons of missionaries hunted with the son of a peasant in the lower Himalayas between 1940 and 1984 they were able to merge their self-images through hunting on neutral ground.

It is important to keep in mind that both peasants and missionaries were marginal actors -- albeit to different degrees, and with different allegiances -- in the drama of empire building, and that their encounter, as bunters in the jungles of northern India, was categorically different from the epic drama of colonial and precolonial blood sport: "the sport of kings:" Hunting of this sort among the imperial elite was an activity [Dil Das -- Enslaved Heart ++page 9] conducted on a massive scale with scores of elephants, beaters, gunbearers, scouts, cooks, porters, and valets. In pre-independence India, hunting was transformed into a fine art of excess in which the size of the bag -- four tigers, five swamp deer, twelve boar, fifteen pheasant, eight peafowl, and two dozen rock pigeons, for example -- had to keep pace with the scale of the expedition in a kind of frenetic leisure parody of subsistence. Along these lines, blood sport may be understood as a direct extension of imperial conquest, a kind of overt enactment of covert intentions, a ritualized and often dramatic penetration of the jungle to "bag a trophy"-to possess in that most final of all ways, by killing. Whatever else blood sport may be, it is, essentially, heroic to the point of self-parody; a leisure activity that underscores, and allegorically engenders, the moral economy of colonialism.

Despite what might be called the innocence of encounter in Dil Das's memory, it is, ultimately, the power-saturated significance of "the sport of kings" with which he must come to terms in his own narrative. He and his missionary compatriots hunted in the shadow of an imperial allegory that, in part, defined colonial identity at large. The freedom from structure and class while hunting in and around Mussoorie and Pathreni was meaningful, in the context of postindependence India, precisely because of the legacy of the colonial allegory. And the mutable space Dil Das and his friends had created always ran the risk of being subverted by the terms of this more literal metaphor of power. Moreover, as an adult, Dil Das hunted with rajas, maharajahs, and various members of the colonial and postcolonial elite. He became enamored of blood sport, and his own story is -- ironically and tragically -- constructed in terms of this imperial allegory of power. He tells his story within the rubric of "the sport of kings," and this raises the problematic question of where, in the end, does Dil Das -- the hero of his own narrative -- stand in relation to the colonial drama that inspired him. The missionaries with whom he hunted on the fringes of the empire were able, for the most part, to make their escape into nostalgia by leaving India and going "back home" to the United States. There they were able to retell -- or strategically forget -- the myth of complicity from a perspective that could ignore the implications of what they had done. Dil Das, in contrast, had no choice but to stay, and the complicity that had animated his narrative as it fused with theirs, became a half-story of tragic heroism and enslaved imagination. Until his death in 1986 he remained caught between memory, allegory, and the harsh reality of peasant life. He ended up telling a story about himself that promised escape, encoded enslavement, and bespoke, consequently, the tragedy of encounter.

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"School had just reopened, and all of the children had come back up to Mussoorie from the plains where they had been for the winter holidays. Back then there were many sahibs* who came hunting in our jungle, but Ray Smith was different. He was a hunter; a real hunter."

"In those days I was young and did not know very much. As I have told you, [Ernie] Campbell was my guru. When I went hunting, it was with his gun, his ammunition, and his planning. I didn't even know which gun was which. I would just go and pick one out of the cupboard and hunt. These are great things I am telling you; things to think about. But anyway, Ray Smith and I hunted together and he wanted me to tell him if I ever heard of a chance to shoot a leopard."

"It is the village children who know where leopards are. They tend the cattle and the sheep and goats and come across leopards in the jungle. We were waiting for news of a fresh kill so that we could make plans. And we needed to get word in the morning so that we could be at the site by evening of the same day."

"One morning, on my way into town, one of the village children who knew that I was interested in these things gave me the word that a cow had been killed by a leopard over near Kimoi. I had to deliver milk, so I went on into Landour. But after quickly finishing my work I carne back to Ray Smith's house in order to tell him and make plans. He wasn't there, but the memsahib [madam], his mother, showed me a place to rest, and I slept until noon."

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*The term sahib can be translated as an honorific title such as "sir" or "Mr.," but it also suggests a hierarchical relationship marking relative class status. Although used casually in everyday speech, when used by someone like Dil Das to refer to someone like Ray Smith, who was at the time a senior in high school, it evokes a colonial relationship in spite of what may or may not have been intended.
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[Woodstock School ++page 11]

"Finally, after school had finished, Ray Smith came and we began to talk and make plans for the hunt. It was getting late, so we took the carbine apart and put it in a bag to hide it from the forest guard and then headed out for Jaunpur. I dropped off my milk containers at home, and then we set off again toward Jhak and Panch Ram's chan [hamlet or cow shed] by way of Masrana. I guess it must have been one of his cows that was killed. Anyway, we set out from there in search of the kill wondering what would happen if we actually shot the leopard."

"Down in the valley below Jhak there is a cremation ground, and nearby we found where the leopard, or what we thought was a leopard, had pissed. The piss was warm, so the leopard must have been just in front of us. It must have gotten scared when it heard us approaching. We went on slowly, up the slope of the mountain to a ridge where there was an oak tree and some bushes. I saw something moving in the bushes and could just make out half of a body and what I thought must have been a leopard's tail. Ray Smith could see it too, but said to me that he thought it was a barasingha [a "twelve-horned" deer]. I said, `I don't know; I'm not sure; barasingha aren't usually found in these mountain jungles; they aren't usually found in my jungle. But, in any case, shoot the damn thing and we'll find out!' So we went on up slowly and reached the ridge. The bushes in which we had seen the animal were not very far away; maybe as far away as that than over there, about fifteen meters. From the top of the ridge we could see down below where a buffalo was grazing across the stream, and where a ravine ran up the opposite slope past some chans. Had we not approached very slowly and quietly the leopard -- or what we thought was a leopard -- would have heard us and run off. We were very careful:'

"Now, what we thought was a barasingha in the bushes turned out to be what we thought was a leopard! Whatever it was, it had now turned in our direction and was moving slightly. It was dusk now, about 6:30 or 7:00, and getting dark, but there was still just enough light to shoot. Taking aim, Ray Smith fired, and the carbine went `Phutt!' And then right away he fired again, and hit the leopard -- or what we thought was a leopard -- in the chest. Much to our relief it fell down. We were thrilled!"

"Now, in those days I didn't know what I now know. It was on that day that I first learned the English word `tiger,' for a leopard is a leopard, but this thing we had shot had stripes! I said to Ray Smith, `OK, let's lift it up and carry it home.' So I bent down and tried to lift one end, but it wouldn't budge. I didn't have enough strength to even move it an inch. `OK,' I said, `let's hide it over there behind those bushes, and then we'll go home for help.' So that is what we did, and we left the gun behind too and ran back toward the school."

"At Bhataghat we met a forest guard, but we said nothing and just ran [++page 12 Bal Kand/The Book of Childhood] on until we got back to the school. Then we went to Palisades, down below Taftan, and told the sahib -- Ray Smith's father -- what we had done. After telling everyone what had happened, we returned by way of the Tehri road to retrieve the tiger. We brought some coolies with us, and a dandi (a sedan chair) to carry the tiger in. John sahib, Campbell sahib, and Smith sahib, Ray Smith's father -- all the important men -- also came along. They brought torches and their big rifles."

"Now, what I had done was to place leaves along the path so that we would not forget our way back to the place where the tiger-we-hadthought-was-a-leopard was. We got as far as Masrana when Campbell sahib asked if we really knew where we were going. I told him that we were following the leaves. When we got close to the spot I said that we should be careful in case the tiger had a mate. I told Campbell sahib to take the lead since it was a very narrow path and we could not go side by side. He said, `Hey, what are you doing, trying to get me killed? You go first. This is your doing, after all!"'

"When we got within range, I took a shotgun and fired a round of bird shot into the tiger to make sure it was dead. I shot twice. It was then that I told them that I did not know what it was that we had shot. It was not an animal from our jungle. Campbell sahib and the others said it was a tiger. They told us that we should not have shot it, but then they said it would be all right; that they would take care of any problem with the forest department. Campbell sahib said that we should learn our lesson well. It was only because of the carbine that we were alive. `Otherwise,' he said, `they would be there collecting our bones and not those of the tiger!' "

"That day there was such a commotion about our having shot a tiger that the whole school was shut down. Everyone from Mussoorie came to see the tiger and take our picture. Then we began to skin it. But what was to be done with the skin since it was illegal to kill a tiger? We tried to take it down to Buddhoo Moochi's house in Dehra Dun and get him to do the tanning, but all he could say was, `What is this? Where did you shoot it?'"

"Now, there were two officials from the forest department there as well, and they began to ask the same questions. I said, straight out, `We shot it in my village, where else!' But we had no permit, no license, you see, and so we got into trouble. In the end the case was taken all the way to the chief conservator of forests in Naini Tal. I don't know exactly what happened, but I am told that it was only the person who owned the rifle who was held accountable, no one else."

"It was all out in the open. It was a public issue and we did not try to hide. Our pictures were taken with the skin, and everyone knew who had shot the tiger. Something must have been done to resolve the case, however. A fine had to be paid, but it was all out in the open. We did not try to hide anything." [Woodstock School ++page 13]

"The skin of the tiger was kept at the old skating rink for some time. I saw it there. One day my friends came to see it, too, one of whom was a sardar, a Sikh gentleman. We had a drink together and got to talking about the tiger. He said he knew about these things and wanted to see where the shot had gone into the body. He started looking in the stomach area, but I told him the bullet went into the head. But he kept on saying that he knew all about tiger shooting and where the bullet must have gone. I told him not to talk as though he knew more than he did."

"Now, my friend, the skin was rightfully ours -- Ray Smith's and mine -- and I told everyone who wanted it that they could not have it. It was ours. We had shot it. Many big men came to try and get their hands on it, but I told them that I was the one they would have to talk to. They offered ten thousand rupees. They wanted to buy it as a trophy to decorate their homes. In the end it was sold; sold by the forest department to someone who knew the conservator, I guess. It was rightfully ours, but they sold it for ten thousand rupees. And then when they came to carry it away, I told them they would need four men to lift the skin, but they didn't listen. I said they had better listen to me. I said I wouldjust keep talking until they listened. They could not ignore me. In the end they lost; all the big sardars I mean. Vinod from Hamer and Company [a local shop] was also there. He understood what I was saying. He was with me. He understood that I was a hunter and that the skin was ours."

"Now, from that day onward I was a hunter. From that very day, mind you. Campbell sahib instructed me; he taught me what I know, and he told me that hunting was a dangerous business. But from that day I have become addicted to hunting. It is my life."

* * *

"Ray Smith and I had walked and walked and got all the way to Jaunpur; you know the place north of Landour, across the Aglar River around Nag Tibba. We pitched our 'camp' in some long, flat fields. Then we went down below the lowest field about thirty or forty meters and I saw a kakar [a "barking" deer]. But we had been walking all day, and I was tired, so we sat down and I had a smoke before saying anything. When I was finished I said, as though I had just seen it, `There, a kakar has came out of the bushes.' Ray had a .22 rifle with him. He fired and hit the deer, but it was only wounded and still moving. He always kept one cartridge in the chamber and another held between his teeth. He did this so that no time would be wasted in reloading. That was his style; our style. You can tell people this when you write my story. If you see Ray you can remind him. Anyway, he reloaded and killed the deer with the second shot."

"After shooting the kakar, we came back up and visited an old man [++page 14 Bal Kand /The Book of Childhood] whose acquaintance we had made. We had stayed with him and he had fed us. We had nothing with us except one old sleeping bag; no food. We said, thanking him: `You have fed us and we have hunted in front of you.' Then I took the deer and presented it to the old man. He said, `What am I supposed to do with this?' I said, 'Eat it. We cannot take it back to Mussoorie with us.' The old man was all alone, poor fellow."

"Well, the old man was pleased, so he took out some sur [a fermented beerlike drink] and gave it to us to drink. We sat through the night and cooked the kakar and drank sur. In the morning we left and walked up along the ridges as far as Kyari village. When we got to the village we told the people we were hungry. So what did they do? They got out sur for us to drink. They also brought out food, so we ate and drank .... You see, all along the way we got food and liquor. We didn't have to worry."

* * *

"When I was young, probably about my nephew Beeji's age, seven, maybe eight years old, or possibly younger, I went with my mother to her natal village up beyond Uttarkashi. I remember the road even now. There was a rope bridge across the river.

"Once, many years later, Ray Smith and I went up to a village near there where it was reported that a leopard had killed a cow. We were going to try and shoot the leopard. However, when we got to the village we discovered that the cow had already been eaten, and it was too late to sit up over the kill."

"Since I knew the road, and it was not far, I went on up to my mother's village; up where my mamu lives above Uttarkashi. Later on Ray Smith and I went up to the fish hatcheries, past the forest office on the road to Agora. As we had stopped there to make our camp, the forest officer came out and asked us to provide him with some meat. I told the officer that the sahib was sleeping. I could not wake him and ask, but that since we did have a license we would most likely be able to do as he requested."

"The next morning we went up to the steep slopes above the forest office. There we saw three very big ghoral [mountain goats]. We had Campbell's old carbine -- who has it now? Mark sahib, I think. Yes, that is right. Anyway, Ray Smith fired and the goats fell right at our feet! We did not have to move an inch or do a thing!"

"It was getting around the time we had planned to leave. We had decided that since the people there at the hatcheries had been so helpful we would shoot some ghoral and provide them with meat. Just as we were packing up our things and getting ready to go, however, the forest guard came and started acting very official. He asked us what we thought we were doing shooting ghoral without his permission. I said, [Woodstock School ++page 15] sarcastically: `OK, friend, so this is your game. Yesterday everything was fine, but now you have developed an attitude. So what's up?'"

"Now, in those days everything was cheap, even bribes, so I offered him a ten-rupee note. But what did he do; he grabbed the gun and took it into his house! So I went up to his door and once again offered him ten rupees, and also said he could have the ghoral we had shot. He would not listen."

"He was inside making khichari [a mixture of lentils and rice], and the rifle was leaning up against the wall in the corner. I was standing at his door, you see, and tried to slowly sneak in to where I could grab the gun. But then he got upset because I had shoes on in his house. Then again I offered him ten rupees, and ten more in addition to that, but he would not listen. Finally he leaned over to poke the fire and blow on the coals, and while he was not looking I jumped, picked up the gun, and whipped around. Then I said, while he was still standing there surprised, `See here, one shot was fired at the ghoral and there are still fourteen left in the clip. Don't move or I'll shoat you in the chest!' I fired a warning shot just to emphasize the point."

"Well, the sahib heard all of this and got worried. He said that we had better get back to Uttarkashi. But then we decided not to since the forest guard was not about to try anything. He was left speechless! Even so, he was bold enough to ask us for the inside organs and the head of the goat. I told him to forget about it; we were going to take the ghoral up to Deodital and eat it there:"

"We divided up the load between us and started out. I was strong. We walked up to those chans just below the bridge where there are people from Agora and Kasur. We wanted to cut up the goat to make it easier to carry. I tried to get help from a woman who was inside one of the chans, but she was afraid and would not come out to help us. Then a boy came by and I told him not to be afraid. I told him we needed help skinning and butchering the ghoral. So the boy helped us and we took three legs on up into the mountains with us, leaving the rest for the people in the chans to divide among themselves."

"After walking for hours we arrived at Deodital. We arrived at the lake and cooked and ate the three legs. We also met a number of other people from the school up there. I guess they had come hiking to enjoy the view. Later we went hunting again -- in those days I did not even know the meaning of the word tired!"

"It was very cold up there. We were hunting kastura [musk deer]. We managed to kill one, but kastura are very small, and there were twenty of us altogether and not enough meat to go around. So this is what we did, we decided to tell everyone in the camp that we had shot a langur [monkey]! We butchered the musk deer out of sight and then brought [++page 16 Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood] the meat back to camp. We cooked it and ate, and told everyone that we had decided to eat monkey meat because we were hungry. The coolies who were with us would not touch the stuff! There was an old man, however, who said to himself, `Now I know that Dil Das would never eat a monkey.' He knew what was going on. But when he took me aside and asked, I insisted that we were eating langur. I said it was a monkey and that he was welcome to help himself. When he asked how it was that I was able to eat the meat, I told him that it was just a matter of necessity, and that you have to do what you have to do. We bantered on like this for some time, and then he finally said, 'No matter, I too will eat some monkey.' He figured it out, you see."

"Bahadur was our cook. His uncle lives there at the toll gate now, and he used to work at the school with Fleeting. Well, Bahadur had hung the butchered musk deer up in a tree and I told the men that they were all fools; if they would only go and smell the meat they would realize that it was not monkey. I told them to go and sniff the meat and judge for themselves, but no one would tell them outright that it was not a monkey we had shot!"

"In those days there was nothing but a small temple up at Deodital; nothing else .... No bungalow near the lake .... The fun we had back then is not to be had now. What a forest. But cars go right up there, you see; almost right to the lake."

* * *

"One time the Smith boys, my uncle Abloo, and I went on a hiking trip. The bays were all very young then, probably not much older than Beeji; about twelve or thirteen. We were going up toward Kathling, the glacier behind Tehri, and Smith sahib and memsahib had asked me to look after their children:"

'Along the way we stopped and Abloo bought a basket of cholu fruit [small sour plums] from some kids for a couple of rupees. I told him not to, but he did anyway. He ate the whole thing and, just as I suspected, he got sick with cholera. We were on our way up to Gansali and stopped in a rest house at Ghanti along the way. We got as far as Ghanti by car, and planned to walk on from there. So the next day we started out. Up at Gansali now there is a bridge and a town, but back then there was nothing. We had to go all the way down the mountain to Ganga ji [the Ganga River], to find a place to make some tea."

"Well, we were walking up to Gansali and got as far as Sankhari when Abloo started to get very sick. I stayed back with him and told the Smith boys I would meet them on ahead at the pilgrim rest house. After I got [Woodstock School ++page 17] Abloo settled down I went on. What else could I do? I gave him a tin of fruit to eat in case he got hungry. I tell you, that day was a bad one for me. I was supposed to look after the children but had to take care of my uncle. So I went on up the trail to catch up with the children. When we got up to Gansali we found that there was just a pilgrim's guest house, a mill, and a few tea shops -- nothing else. Even so, we got settled in. I made some khichari, fed the kids, and then told them that I had to go back down and take care of Abloo. I told them not to move until I got back. I had to travel at night and the distance and terrain was like from here to Rajpur, about ten kilometers up and down. Twenty, round trip."

"Now, I thought to myself that the place was very strange and unfamiliar, but that if I wanted to make it safely I would. I could. So I kept going and going until I came near to Sankhari. Near the village I saw that my uncle was coming along the path toward me and said to myself, Ah, he is not dead!' I was relieved. I had thought to myself on the way down that if he had died I would have just thrown his body into the Ganga and that would have been that. It took us a long time to reach one another, but when finally we met along the path I saw that he was crying. I told him not to worry; everything would be all right. I picked up his bags and started to carry them back up the path to Gansali, back to where I had left the boys."

"When we got there I asked some people to provide us with a coolie to carry our things on up to Gangi. I had friends up there and we could leave our loads with them and then go on up to Kathling, to the glacier. Well, a coolie was found, and I told him that I would give him food and tea as payment. He agreed, and we went on up. As we got higher and higher it began to get cold. All along I kept giving Abloo medicine and he improved somewhat. We got as far as Dhokari, where I found a friend of mine. I told him we would be going hunting further up, so he decided to come along. He had a muzzle loader and kept everything he needed in the collar of his woolen jacket; his powder, shot, and cotton -- everything."

"As we got further up, Abloo's health got worse again. Then my friend from Dhokari took out some medicine he kept in his collar and gave it to uncle. Soon he felt better. That night we found an overhanging rock and all of us climbed under it and fell asleep. In the morning we got up and made some tea. Then there was the question of food. What were we going to do? I told everyone to wait and that we would be able to get some where we were going. Now, the trail from there was all covered with snow but was marked by a path of stones which had been placed on top of the snow to show the way. We walked and walked until finally we got to the glacier. We tried to make some food there, but there was [++page 18 Bal Kand / The Book of Childhood] no wood to start a fire. All we had were some paraffin pellets, and with these we made some coffee. We ate some cookies, a little popcorn, and puffed oats and this served as our meal."

"After a short time we started back down to Gangi, but along the way Abloo's knees gave out and he could not walk. Even though I was carrying a load I had to carry him as well. There was nothing else to do. I put him on my shoulders and carried him. Now, if Ghanti had been as far away as Landour from here, about five kilometers, it would not have been a problem. But it was a long way. Ghanti was two or three days' walk away. I had my load and I had to carry my uncle. So we walked and walked. But then I realized that the children's school was going to reopen soon and that we had to hurry back. I told them we would have to walk at night as well. Finally we got back to where the bridge is now and I told everyone that I would go on and make arrangements for a car. This was after the second day and Abloo was feeling a little better. He was able to walk slowly. Even so, I told them all to wait for me there."

"I walked on to Ghanti and made arrangements for a bus. There were no cars. I bought six tickets and told the driver to wait for us, but that if we were late to wait only ten minutes before leaving. I went back quickly and we all made it back down to Ghanti in time."

"Now, I was very tired and when we got into the bus I told the Smith boys and Abloo to take the seats but to leave me the aisle. I had a bag with me which I put down as a pillow. I said, `You may put your feet on me. I don't care. Just let me go to sleep!' I lay down and went to sleep and didn't wake up until Agrakhala, on the road to Mussoorie beyond Tehri, but below Chamba, where there is a police station. I got off to buy some food and saw a policeman standing nearby. He turned out to be a friend of mine. He asked where I was coming from and I told him the whole story -- the children, the cold, the lack of food, and my uncle's sickness. He invited me in to have some tea. I said, 'Never mind the tea, but if you have anything which will relieve my tiredness I will take it.' I asked him for some liquor, you see. It was not easily available, and there was nobody else there who would be able to provide it. No sir! Now, had I been in Mussoorie or Dehra Dun I could have made arrangements, but not there. But I told my friend the policeman I was dead tired. So he said, `Sit, sit,' and gave the others tea. Then he took me aside and brought me into the police station. He brought out a bottle of kacchi, and he, another policeman, and I drank it together. I thanked him and then we went on our way"

"When we got to Dehra Dun I bought a quarter bottle of liquor but didn't drink it. I didn't eat anything right away, either. There was one man on the bus with us then who wouldn't eat any meat or drink any liquor. I told him he would die of hunger and of weakness if he did not.
[Woodstock School ++page 19]
But all he ate were some jalebis (sweets). That was all. So I drank the liquor and ate some meat and rice. Then we started off on the road to Mussoorie, and by the time we got to Kulukhet, to the municipal toll gate, I was feeling very strong again. At Kulukhet I had many friends; they are our people there, you know, people from the hills. There are villages nearby and kacchi is easily available, you see. The Munsi there gave me a shot of liquor; you know him, the toll collector. Well, by the time we got back up to Mussoorie everything was fine. I was feeling good. So I took the children back home. I could have stayed, but I told the memsahib, Mrs. Smith, that I was very tired and would go straight back to the village."

"Three days later I came back up to the school and told both sahib and memsahib the whole story. They agreed that I had suffered greatly. It was only because I went along that the memsahib had agreed to let the children go, you see. If I had not gone along they would not have been allowed to go. And the children were all behind me as well. They were the ones who wanted me to go with them."

* * *

"I had gone to Kulu, over in the mountains beyond Simla in Himachal, with Taylor sahib, his wife, and their children. They were on vacation from school. At that time there were military people in the valley, and so there were restaurants and places to buy meat. We, of course, wanted to go hunting, so we asked around about guns and ammunition. Now, back then I didn't know very much, but I was worried. You see, there were Buddhist lamas in the area, and I was worried about what might happen if they found out we were hunting. After all, the children were with us."

"Anyway, when I returned from Kulu I fell ill with a fever. At home my mother had made dehi [yogurt]. I was eager to eat some, but she told me not to as it would make my fever worse. Dehi is a cold thing, you see. I did not get better for a long time. I still had a fever, so I came up to the Landour Community Hospital to get a diagnosis. There was a doctor back then named Chapman, and I went to the hospital to be examined by him."

"I remember that he gave me as much tomato salad and dehi to eat as I wanted, as much as I wanted! This was in October and November. Then he told me I had tuberculosis and sent me off with a letter of explanation to the hospital in Ludhiana where I could receive intensive treatment. Dr. Fisch and Dr. Garst were there. I went with my father, but then told him to leave me and go on back as the expense of staying would be too great. I had to have injections and many other things. So I went to Ludhiana and stayed a long time. I stayed a long time in the Punjab."

END of this selection.

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