Some of the traffic to my blog comes from people searching online for pictures of the three Travancore sisters, my family’s movie star neighbors in Chennai. Queries come from India, but also from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, Sri Lanka, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Perhaps the sight of these three beautiful ladies has been a remedy for homesickness for people spread over the globe by the Indian diaspora. But you don’t have to be Indian to love them.

The sisters are no longer with us, but decades after they made their movies, they still have devoted fans.

Like the older two, Lalitha and Padmini, the youngest Travancore sister, Ragini, was a stunning dancer with a sparkling screen presence. The tallest of the three, she would often play a male role in dance dramas. She’s made up with a little moustache in this clip from Ummini Thanka, a 1961 Malayalam film. She could also wield a cricket bat!

These photos show her luminous beauty.

Greetings for the Big Day–in other words, Merry Christmas!

Christmas Eve in India, we hung stockings in preparation for Santa’s coming, as in this 1958 photo.

My sisters Deborah and Jane are standing on three-legged stools that tended to be tippy, but somehow we escaped mishaps. The Nataraj on the mantelpiece (Lord Siva as cosmic dancer) witnessed many such ceremonies.

The suitcase-y thing on the right was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, playing “White Christmas” and “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

Not much danger of that! But we made “snow” out of Lux soap flakes and daubed it on our Christmas tree—a bush that lived outside in its tub the rest of the year.

Deb and Jane are scrubbed and ready for bed. There isn’t a hair out of place in Jane’s long tight braids. Deb’s giving you an evening namasté.

Lee and I, however, are dressed to stay up with the grown-ups for a while—lucky big girls.

Another year, Jane was the “first angel” in her school’s Christmas pageant.

If I may jump back even further in time, here is our 1953 Christmas card, from Chennai, (then Madras.) Lee, my mom, and I are wishing everyone the merriest of holidays. And so do I now, and may 2013 be your best year ever.

One of the nicest parts of having a book published has been hearing from complete strangers and immediately feeling a sort of kinship with them.

What more colorful thing could I find in my mailbox than this air letter from Malaysia?

It was from a lady in Kuala Lumpur (British, I think), who apologized for being a “dinosaur” and not using a computer. Apologized? Good grief, she made my day!

She had lived in Chennai (then Madras) during the 1950s, when my family did, and had been married there in 1951, in St. Mary’s Cathedral. This sent me scurrying to Google, where I found that the church, built 1678-1680, is the oldest Anglican cathedral “east of Suez.” It absolutely reeks of history.

She also told me that she and her husband had, over the years, taken walks on the beach gathering green sea glass. Her husband had had the “stones” made into earrings and a couple of necklaces, which they called her “emeralds.” The necklace that Jana Bibi gets from Ramachandran’s Treasure Emporium in the book reminded her of her own treasures. Sounds like her husband is a treasure, too!

Mr. Ganguly celebrates all sorts of human holidays, religious and secular. He thinks primates should reciprocate and observe his bird-related holidays! In addition to New Year’s Day, Easter, Holi, Divali, and so forth, he’s got the following on his calendar:

January 5 National Bird Day, United States. Mr. Ganguly sends best wishes to any of his friends in the U.S. who are celebrating this day. The organization Born Free USA warns that of the estimated 9,800 bird species on earth, 12% are in danger of extinction. Of the 330 parrot species, one third are in peril.

January 13 Makar Sankranti. Hindu festival. People fly kites and celebrate the return of migratory birds. Crows will be honored. Mr. Ganguly will be worried, because birds can get caught in kite strings. Also, he does not like organized bird fights.

April 8 Draw a Bird Day. You don’t have to be an artist to participate. I think Holt editor Joanna Levine is a shoo-in to win, with her picture of Mr. Ganguly reading two books at once!

May 11 International Migratory Bird Day. Mr. Ganguly knows what’s going on in the Western hemisphere. Inspired by an organization called Environment for the Americas, he celebrates the migrations of nearly 350 bird species between North America and Latin America, Mexico, and the Caribbean.

May 31 World Parrot Day. Stamp out capturing parrots in the wild and reverse destruction of our habitat, says Mr. Ganguly! He admires this video clip of Macaws and their companion humans that descended on Trafalgar Square in 2011 to publicize the plight of parrots.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWb71PmRfSw

Our house in New Delhi got flooded, in 1958. It was during the monsoon season, and a drainage ditch near our house overflowed its embankments, leaving a foot or so of water on the ground floor of the houses in our neighborhood. I hate to think of what was floating around in that water, but I ended up wading in it as my dad took pictures. You can see the high water mark on the living room wall.

My dad picked up a case of hookworm, and it took several months to get rid of it. The cure, as he described it, was highly unpleasant—akin to swallowing a bottle of furniture polish remover.

Otherwise, I don’t remember many ill effects. As floods go, it was minor, and we were lucky. Out family of six got split up temporarily and went to three different households in Delhi. My sister Jane and I got lodged with some Danish friends, which left us saying “tak” for “thank you” for a while. The mom had her own ideas about medical treatment. When I caught cold, she dosed me with brandy. I recovered quickly.

We salvaged a surprising number of objects from those muddy waters. The sideboard in the photo dried out and got polished up, and over the next five decades, my parents moved it to at least four other houses. They had it for many years in their rustic mountain cottage in New Hampshire, along with bric-a-brac picked up in their various overseas posts. (My sisters and I called their decorating style “Indo-Parisian brothel.”)

Several albums of photographs got soaked, and we separated and flattened the pages. Later, we stuck the photos in new albums. After my parents died, hundreds of those photos went into the Colby-Sawyer College archives. I’m still sorting through others, and, of course, many go straight into this blog.

Pictured above: My mom playing Scrabble in her later years. Don’t be deceived by that little smile, she was a ferocious competitor. Actually, the gene is on both sides of the family. I can still picture my two grandmothers locked in Scrabble combat against each other. Scary!

One of my mom’s Scrabble weapons may well have been Indian words. I read somewhere that 900 English words come from Indian languages–Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, and many others. At least 250 of those words have made it into the Official Scrabble ™ Players Dictionary.

Some of them have passed so completely into English that a Scrabble player wouldn’t even consider challenging them: bazaar, cashmere, guru, harem, karma, pajama, yoga.

Other words you might not know without some exposure to India, either real-life or of the armchair variety. For example: dacoit, a bandit; topee or topi, a sun helmet; walla or wallah, a person engaged in a particular occupation or activity or associated with a particular place.

A taste for Indian music would also beef up your Scrabble vocabulary, say with sitar, a long-necked Indian lute; sarod, another kind of lute; or tabla, a small drum. Here’s a less common one: tala, a traditional rhythmic pattern of music in India.

Indian restaurant goers know chutney, chapatti, dal, and poori. (Chutnee, chapati, dhal and puri will get you points, too.)

In fact, your spelling can be shaky, and you’ll still be okay with a lot of words. Bheesty, bheestie, and bhistie, all mean “a water carrier.” Hadj, haj, and hajj are ways to spell the pilgrimage to Mecca, and hadjee, hadji, haji, and hajji, a person who has made that trip.

By the way, just because these words are okay for Scrabble, doesn’t mean they’ll get past your word processor’s spell checker. I just gave mine a nervous breakdown. Really, how provincial of it!

I was about to throw out a shoebox of cassette tapes the other day, but instead, popped one into a portable cassette player (also retrieved from the dark corners of a closet) and had a listen.

The tape was of my sister Lee interviewing my dad in 2002. Most of the lore had been ingrained in our heads, but I’d forgotten exactly how my dad, Everett Woodman, had met his retired schoolteacher friend, P. A. Thiruvenkatachari, “Mr. Patch,” sometime in 1954.

At that time a young cultural affairs officer with the United States Information Service in Chennai, India, my father had been invited to give a talk in Chengalpattu, about thirty-five miles away. He barreled out there (not a trivial drive in those days), expecting to find a “young men’s association” and instead was greeted by fifteen or twenty men in their seventies or older. Drawing on his background in psychology, he spoke on Western theories of personality development. At the end, one of the venerable audience members rose to give the “vote of thanks.”

“It was a good speech,” allowed Mr. Patch. “Maybe not the best we ever heard, but a good speech.” Then the erudite Mr. Patch went through the talk and refuted it point by point.

Thus began a friendship that lasted until Patch’s death in 1972. To paraphrase novelist George Eliot, theirs was a friendship of much agreement, some disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Another speaking engagement: Everett Woodman at PEN Conference, 1954. Seated second to right is Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, then Vice-President of India, and, far right, Jawaharlal Nehru, then Prime Minister. The VP and the PM look decidedly underwhelmed.

I’m looking for a picture. Here’s the story.

When I was planning and writing Love Potion Number 10, I wanted some helicopter lore. A friend introduced me (by phone) to Captain Rustom Captain, who had served as helicopter pilot to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Captain Captain, whose Indian civil helicopter pilot license was number 1, is now retired and lives in Canada. We had several good phone conversations about such things as makes and models of aircraft, how high you could fly in a chopper, and where you could refuel if making a helicopter trip in India in the early 1960s.

Even more fascinating was hearing about Rustom’s career. Rustom was a prominent figure in Indian aviation. At age twenty-one, he was the youngest ever Chief Flying Instructor at the Bombay Flying Club, and his distinguished career in civil aviation won him wide recognition and a silver salver from the Indian government. He served as Director in Charge of Cambatta Aviation, Ltd.

In 1968, he took the Beatles sightseeing by air, when they made their famous visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram in Rishikesh, in northern India.

I found a couple of photos of this visit on the Internet, one from an aviation company (scroll down to picture 19) and the other from a Beatles fan blog. In both, the Maharishi has on his usual jolly expression, and John Lennon is concerned with his camera. Rustom, in the pilot’s seat between them, is partly obscured.

The May 19, 1968 issue of the Saturday Evening Post also contained a picture of the Maharishi aboard the helicopter, with another man, perhaps Rustom, turned away from the camera.

Rustom tells me that he used to have a better picture of this event, where you can clearly see all three faces–right to left, the Maharishi, himself, and John Lennon. He no longer has the picture, but would like to find a copy. I’d love to track it down. It may be in the Asian edition of Life magazine, most probably in early March 1968, but I haven’t found a library that has that edition. Any photo sleuths out there? Do send me your clues!

A minor character in Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes is Mr. Abinath, the town’s dispensing chemist. He plays a bigger role in book two, Love Potion Number 10 (scheduled to come out in May, 2013.) His apothecary is crammed full of medicines and cosmetics, including a line of vitamins he is developing. He wants to go beyond the commonly known vitamins (A, B, C, D, etc.) and formulate a concoction for every letter of the alphabet.

I got the idea of an alphabet of vitamins from Pratap Singh Tamli, the head bearer (major domo) of our household in Delhi, who used to tell us kids, “Babas, you must eat this food, it is full of vitamins from A to Zed!” I still congratulate myself when I cook spinach or quinoa or some other healthy stuff. I figure it just has to be full of vitamins from A to Zed.

But back to Abinath. He makes a nice almond hand cream, which Jana buys regularly. He keeps up with the fashionable ailments. You know how it is: one year migraine is in, the next year, foot trouble. His philosophy of medicine is that a tonic should make you feel better just by thinking about taking it. It’s a matter of setting expectations, he says.

Mr. Ganguly, Jana’s parrot, doesn’t usually take any medication, at least not yet. (Maybe he’ll need something in book three.) But, when my editor Joanna Levine at Henry Holt and Company sent me the page proofs for book two, she pictured him getting into the medicine cabinet.

 

Oh boy, that’s one love-struck bird.

Jana’s in India, folks.

Well of course she’s in India. That’s where Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes is set.

What I mean is, in addition to the original book put out by Henry Holt (a MacMillan company), soon there will be an edition for sale on the Indian subcontinent, published by Random House India.

RHI offices are in a high-rise building in Noida, a glittering modern town across the river from Delhi. Noida didn’t even exist when I was growing up in India! Holt  is headquartered in the iconic Flatiron building in New York.

The people at both publishers are dyed-in-the-wool book lovers, totally passionate about books. In other words, they’re saving civilization as we know it!

They’re both also fun to work with, whether in person or at a distance. The RHI folks recently tweeted me to say they were about to have lunch and Tarot card readings at a restaurant in Hauz Khas Village, in south Delhi. Jana should have been there to pick up a few pointers!

And I’ve mentioned before that Joanna Levine at Holt knows how to make my day with her cartoons of Mr. Ganguly.

 

The world sometimes seems so small and intimate! As I walk around talking to the squirrels in the woods of New Hampshire, it makes me happy to think that I’m connected to teammates on both sides of the globe.