The sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of Normandy was approaching, and my eighty-eight-year-old dad, Everett Woodman, very much wanted to go to the ceremonies at the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. He’d been a young naval officer in the historic battle, serving on a Landing Craft Infantry that carried American special forces to Omaha Beach and led the way for other such craft.

My mom, Ruthie, then eighty-three, would have preferred to stay home; plus, she was having memory problems. My sisters and I were anxious about this trip, but there was a safety net of sorts—cousin Persis would meet my parents at Charles de Gaulle airport and take them to their hotel, a friend would put them on the train to Normandy, another would pick them up in Caen, and so forth. Near the beaches, my parents had been invited to stay with a local citizen who was eager to host an “ancien combattant.”

Seeing my parents off from Boston on May 31, my sister Jane and I grew increasingly nervous. We asked at Air France if there were any empty seats on the plane. Ha! Not a chance. All right, the die was cast. Off through security they trundled, my dad hobbling on two canes and my mom clutching a worn black handbag tightly against her body.

Around noon the next day, I called their hotel in Paris. Sorry, I was told, they’re not here. Next, I tried Persis. Seems that the arrival had been a bit of a disaster: Persis was half an hour late at Charles de Gaulle; the luggage was delayed; the first hotel had not worked out; they’d moved to another; and then—my mom went down to the lobby, told the clerk she was going to see what was playing at the movies, and headed in the direction of the Champs Elysées. She ended up in a Gabon Air office, and, mercifully, found her list of emergency numbers in her handbag; by that time my dad had called the police and the American embassy.

The next evening, Jane and I were on an Icelandair flight to Paris via Reykjavík. At the hotel, we found my dad white as a sheet, with bags under his eyes. He hadn’t slept in two nights. In contrast, my mom looked good.

Jane and I had a busy week. How had we ever thought that the parents could manage? The train stations had long, steep staircases. The restaurants, taxis, restrooms, ATM machines never seemed to be there when you needed them.

Fortunately, my dad wore a cap proclaiming his Omaha beach history. Little boys ran up to him on the street and asked for his autograph. Everywhere, the French bent over backwards to help us. At one particularly daunting train station, a young railway employee spied us, found a wheelchair, led us into a freight elevator, and escorted us onto the train.

In Louvières, Marie-Thérèse Exmelin, seventy-four years old, ended up with four guests rather than the two she had expected, but her good humor never flagged. My mother’s French held up beautifully, and our hostess dubbed her “madame toujours souriante.” The always smiling lady.

Finally, Jane and I got passes to the June 6th ceremony. (I’m in the hat.)

My dad had seen Saving Private Ryan, so after the speeches, he chatted with Tom Hanks about the realism of the film.

On the way back to Boston, Air France bumped my parents from coach to first class, and the pilot invited my dad into the cockpit for the landing at Logan. Dad was thrilled. Vive la France!

My dad died in 2007, and my mom in 2011. I tell this story in grateful memory of them and with love to my sister Jane. She’s a great traveling companion.

George and Jeannie Miller were among my parents’ best friends; they live in California and we keep in touch. George grew up in India and returned as a United States Information Service officer.

He graduated from Woodstock School in 1940, and has wonderful stories to tell, such as the time he almost burned down the boys’ hostel by running a pakora-frying operation out of his room.

He remembers with fondness going to the bazaar and having a double roti with vegetable curry. That double roti sounded so good that I’m putting it on the menu of the Why Not? Tea Shop in the third Jana Bibi book.

Jeannie’s no slouch as a storyteller, either.

Jeannie recalls how both she and my mom received frequent visits from the same brasswalla. The bargaining was intense. If it broke down, Mr. Beg would announce indignantly that Mrs. Woodman would never offer such an insultingly low price for such a fine piece. Then he’d come to our house and play the game in reverse with my mom.

Thanks to Jeannie for permission to post these line drawings from her charming memoir about foreign service life.

Memsahib Takes A Tonga

The Brass Merchant

From Jeannie Miller, Believe Me When I Tell You, Aftab Alam Press, Lahore, Pakistan.

Some time in the early 1970s, my parents met up in New York City with their friend Padmini, her husband, Dr. Ramachandran, and their son.

As you may remember, Padmini (1932-2006) was the middle sister of India’s Travancore Sisters, wildly popular dancers and movie actors at mid-century. Although they are no longer with us, they still have devoted fans across the globe.

My mom hadn’t danced for a long time, but Padmini tried to put her through her paces. Get those arms up there, mom!

My dad, however, was apparently content to sit at her feet.

Then came dinner. The man on the left is Carl Salathe, then development officer for Colby Junior College.

At some point during the 1970s, Padmini founded the Padmini Institute of Fine Arts, which soon had five branches in New York and New Jersey; her dance students were legion.

We were not horsey folks ourselves, but our neighbors in Delhi, the Ensmingers, kept three horses, and allowed us to ride them.

 

I was very enthusiastic for a while, and I usually rode a large and phlegmatic creature called Shah.

 

With the Ensminger kids, we tried to use him in one of our theatrical performances.  We staged the play in the driveway so that one of us could jump on him and dash off, crying “Hi-yo, Silver!” Unfortunately, Shah would not be induced to gallop that day, or even trot, but plodded away at his own sweet pace.

Later, I got spooked after a nerve-wracking ride on one of the other horses, when it decided it would prefer not to have me on its back and bucked for what seemed like an eternity. I stuck to the saddle in grim determination and terror. Afterwards, I considered it a victory to have dismounted alive and was proud of myself, but not proud enough to repeat the experiment.

Lee doesn’t look too happy, either, on vacation (c. 1958) in Mussoorie, where we sometimes rented ponies.

 

All other things being equal, we preferred to have the horse out in front, at a safe remove, as in this excursion (c. 1956) in Delhi in a horse-drawn tonga:

 

Lee, Betsy, my mother holding Jane.

This week brought the sad news of the death of South Indian film star Sukumari, whose career spanned over six decades. An accident resulting in severe burns led to heart failure on Tuesday, March 26, in Chennai.

Sukumari’s year of birth is variously reported as 1938 and 1940. In any case, she was very young when she acted in her first film, Oru Iravu (1951), with her cousin Lalitha of the Travancore Sisters, appearing in scenes depicting Lalitha’s character at a younger age. This film was in Tamil, but Sukumari also appeared in Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Sinhala, and Hindi-language productions. For a long time, the voices in Indian films were dubbed rather than recorded simultaneously, and common practice was to have someone other than the actors do the speaking parts in different languages. Sukumari, like the Travancore sisters, did her own.

In this snake dance from the movie Sarpakadu (1965), Sukumari appears mostly on the left, with her cousin Ambika on the right. In later years, she was greatly in demand for what the newspapers termed “mother roles.” Her productivity was prodigious, as was her popularity among audiences and colleagues in the film industry. In 2003, the Government of India awarded her the prestigious Padma Shri for her contributions to the arts.

These pictures from my parents’ photo album were taken in Chennai around 1954.

Left to right: Ambika, Padmini, Ruth Woodman, Lalitha, Sukumari

Left to right: Ambika, Ragini, Saraswati Amma (the Travancore Sister’s mother), Padmini, Ruth Woodman, Lalitha, Sukumari

My respects and condolences go out to her friends and family.

Here are news reports from the Times of India and The Hindu.

In our family, it was taken for granted that you would dance.

Here’s my mom at about age six, in Newton, Massachusetts, about to be the bride in a show called “A Kewpie Wedding.”

My sister Lee at a performance in Delhi. Of all of us kids, she got the furthest in ballet, advancing from flat shoes to point.

I didn’t escape participating in Woodstock School talent shows.

In addition to classical dance, we learned ballroom dancing-—box step, waltz, foxtrot, cha cha, and jitterbug. Thus prepared, we went forth, dressed in our best, to face the agony of wallflowerdom or the joy of a full dance ticket. (No, we didn’t actually have tickets, but I see I am clutching a little beaded evening bag, probably borrowed from my mother.)

At my parents’ frequent parties, we felt it high privilege to stay up and dance with the grownups. Here, Lee doesn’t quite come up to the armpit of family friend John Marsh.

My mom at a club in Delhi with another family friend, Ujjal Singh:

Tripping the light fantastic. That very expression makes me want to get up and dance!

A few quick fashion notes about the color coordination you see in Indian women’s dress. These ladies are impeccably pulled together:

A mom in elegant monochrome:

The sandstone-colored outfits on the tourists at the gate of the Taj Mahal look custom-made for the scene:

Thanks to my friend Donna Greenberg for the use of the photos.

Hello, all. Here are some more Travancore Sisters pics from my parents’ photo albums.

A formal portrait of Ragini and Padmini:

A couple more of Ragini:

The three informal snaps below are faded and scratched, but I can’t resist posting them anyway. All were taken in Chennai, c. 1954.

Ragini with her brother, Chandran:

Ragini with my little sister, Jane:

Aren’t Ragini’s braids fantastic!

Finally, Padmini with Woodmans:

Padmini’s got me, and I’ve got Jane. Lee’s on the right. My mom and dad, Ruth and Everett Woodman, are in their thirties. Padmini would be in her early twenties.

 

We were the new kids on the block in 1953, the block being Edward Elliot Rd (now Dr. Radhakrishnan Salai) and the city being Madras (now Chennai.) It could have been a difficult adjustment–but instead, it was like falling into a warm bath. This was largely because of the kindess of our hospitable next-door neighbors–the mom, Saraswati Amma, her three daughters, Lalitha, Padmini, and Ragini, their brother, Chandran, and their cousins, Ambika and Sukumari. We were still learning the ropes and no doubt made gaffes right and left, but not to worry, they made allowances!

In their publicity photos the three sisters–India’s beloved Travancore Sisters–look breathtakingly glamorous, but in real life they were girl-next-door-wholesome and unaffected, and nice as could be.

Left to Right, front row: Ambika, Lalitha, Chandran, Ragini, my dad, Padmini, Sukumari. Ragini got stuck holding the camera case.

The gentleman on the left is Guru Gopalakrishnan, who sometimes danced with the sisters.

Lalitha (1930-1982) was the oldest of the sisters, in whose pioneering footsteps Padmini and Ragini followed. She got her start in films at age eight. My parents remembered her as quieter than the other two, with her own gentle mystique. My dad liked to recall the time she sat up all night with a sick kitten in her lap, willing it to live after everyone else had written it off for lost; the kitten recovered.

These pictures date from about 1954:

Here are Lalitha (left) and Ragini (right) in their expressive enactment of a dance drama, also in 1954:

On Youtube, you have to dig a bit to find Lalitha. In this excerpt from a 1949 Tamil movie, Vazhkai (“Life”) Lalitha and Padmini make a special dance appearance in a “play within a play.” (It starts at about 4:06.) Padmini plays the role of a village lad, complete with moustache and turban, driving fake oxen across a stage and showing off her comic skills. Lalitha is absolutely charming in the role of a fresh-faced country girl. The sisters (then teenagers) loved performing together, and it shows. Pure joy!

I’m just back from New York City, where I had a great visit with my childhood friend, Deborah Keehn. Debby and I were friends in Delhi, where we took Bharatanatyam dance lessons together. Later, we were Woodstock School roommates.

Here we are on a typical Saturday morning, busily cleaning our dorm room. We had to pass room inspection before we could go to “the buzz,” as we called the bazaar in Mussoorie.

See? All cleaned up!

I had not been in touch with Debby since college, but, to my delight, found her last year on Facebook.

In New York, we took in a couple of exhibits at the Rubin Museum of Art. One was of the work of Homai Vyarawalla, India’s first female photojournalist. Vyarawalla’s iconic shots include this humorous one of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The exhibit is over, but this podcast tells about Vyarawalla’s life and work.

The other exhibit was Radical Terrain: Modernist Art from India.

Debby was knowledgeable company for this outing. Her parents, Thomas and Martha Keehn, were passionate art collectors, and friends of painters who at that point were struggling but later became world renowned. Items from the Keehn collection and Martha’s letters home to the States are gathered together in a book called India Ink. Irresistible reading for me! Martha was nothing if not candid, and this portrait of an American family in India in the 1950s is a classic.

And, amazing coincidence, the book also revealed that the Keehns had lived in my family’s first Delhi house just before we had. I didn’t know that at the time. Debby and I had more in common than we even realized.