Category: distance
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Luxuriating
In the capacious, perfectly sprung College of Wooster bus on the way from Cleveland Airport, one melted back into miles of smooth pavement stretching out ahead, wide shoulders empty of cyclists, walkers, pedlars, families engaged in construction, and sleepers curled into patches of shade—and with orderly, spaced, manageable traffic. At the airport, one drank from…
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Mrs. Sukhwar on the Train
Mrs. Sukhwar, on the train from Delhi to Haridwar, was pleased that she had recently married her daughter, in her 20s, who is now living in Australia with her husband. Mrs. Sukhwar found the husband through an ad in the newspaper. Later, I looked through the Hindustan Times (“the HT,” as Mrs. Sukhwar refers to…
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Holy Baths
This video (“In Devprayag”), placed here for continuity in the blog but completed well after our return to the U.S., adds illustration to Mark Wilson’s fine description below of our visit to the beginning of the Ganges in Devprayag. His text explains what the video shows: the three rivers, the suspension bridge, the mountains. The…
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Discovery of India
I sat next to Mrs. Sukhwar on the train from New Delhi to Haridwar, and we spoke together in English. She has lived in Delhi for 50 years, though she was born in Lucknow, and she was on her way to Haridwar for the same reason we were: to join the Aarti ceremony in honor…
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Trepidation
In 1889, Rudyard Kipling wrote to his friends in Allahabad that Londoners knew nothing of Life as it was lived, always in peril, in India. Amazingly, Londoners were shocked when an old man died in bed, his family round him. In India, they would see their friends “of thirty-five die at two days’ notice not…