“The Turks entered the village and were aghast at what they found—a rabble of walking skeletons and infirm women. Seeing no value in claiming it, they beheaded all the men (including the village elders, despite their tearful pleas that the village depended on their leadership), collected the children to be sold into slavery and took the pretty, unmarked women with them for their seraglios. All that remained were old, misshapen and ugly women, each missing a buttock. The future of the village seemed foreclosed. But then human nature took a hand. Men began coming from surrounding villages with food and assistance, and, being the beasts they are, demanded as payment the only thing a poor woman has to offer. Within a few years the village had regained much of its former population, and within 15 years the young were marrying and having children and the village was back on its feet. But the villagers learned a valuable lesson from that terrible time. Henceforth the village extended its welcome and hospitality to any and every army that came along, and opened markets to supply their provisions, with the result that the village over the years prospered and grew rich.
“‘That was centuries ago, yet to this day the village holds an annual festival in remembrance of their day of deliverance. The women wear black and walk with a limp. They serve a feast of rump roast, barbecued rat and fricasseed shoe tongues—though it’s said the latter really are rabbit and strips of sowbelly.”
*
“There are many stories like that where I come from,” Mother said, “because that land has always known trouble and strife. But that particular story taught me important lessons. Never give up hope. In sacrifice there is salvation. Be kind, welcoming and charitable to all you encounter. And also it turned me off on the idea of getting involved with men.
“By age 13 I had found my calling in religion and charitable works. I resolved to go where suffering was greatest and compassion was needed most. As tragic and pathetic as my homeland may be, India was far worse. I arrived in Calcutta in 1929. The poverty of India was appalling. I came upon a woman dying on the street in front of a hospital. I took her inside but they would not admit her because she had no money, and so she died in the street. My work was cut out for me. In the beginning we nuns were so poor that we had to beg for food, but God always provided what we needed. And we had many laughs along the way. One time I thoughtlessly assigned the same pair of sandals to three different Sisters, each of whom needed to wear them immediately. I still chuckle over that one…
“My Missionary received the blessing of Pope Pius XII in 1950, and from that time on we have grown and extended our charity to many nations all over the world. We rejoice in our work, and from it I have established a philosophy of life. It goes like this:
“Life is an opportunity, avail it
Life is a beauty, admire it
Life is bliss, taste it
Life is a…”
Sister Nefertiti arrived at my bedside. “Mother, someone is at the door whom you must talk to.”
Mother rose from my bedside, “Excuse me a moment, Jake,” she said. She followed Sister Nefertiti out the door, then returned a few minutes later. “Jake, it seems you have a visitor, a Miss Wehrli.”
Dana! In my hour of need! “Please show her in,” I said. “I would be very happy to see her.”
“Tell me about her,” said Mother.
“Not a lot to tell,” I said. “She’s a dear friend, a girl friend. I’ve known her for years; we grew up together. She works for ABC television now, producing news documentaries.”
“A producer for an American television network, you say?”
“The last I heard, she was involved in their weekly feature program, 20/20.”
Mother turned to Sister Nefertiti. “Sister, perhaps you could find some way to tidy up Jake’s appearance for his visitor?” She got a knowing nod in reply. “Jake, you go with Sister Nefertiti. It won’t take a minute. Meanwhile, I’ll keep your visitor entertained.”
Sister Nefertiti led me down a corridor to an unmarked door and ushered me in. It featured racks of clothing, as well as a washstand and sink with several 10-gallon carboys of clear water on the floor beside it. “First let’s clean you up a bit,” she said. She shucked me out of my pajamas and flour-sack shirt. With more strength than I thought she had, she hefted a carboy and glopped water into the sink, then grabbed a jug of bleach from the cabinet beneath it and dumped in a generous amount. “We don’t indulge in such treatments as a rule, but rules are made to be broken, you know,” she chirped. She sponged me clean, the disinfectant wracking me with numerous Jesus-kisses. After the swab-down she took me to a rack of men’s clothing. “Let’s see what we have here,” she muttered. “Even with your weight loss, you’re larger than most men we get…” She pulled out a pair of worn, khaki pajama bottoms that fit well enough. Next a madras-cloth shirt, not too faded. Finally a presentable pair of slippers. “There, that’s better,” she cooed as she ran a comb through my tangled hair (more Jesus-kisses). “Let’s go greet your guest.”
Dana was perched on a wood chair in a little parlor below a photograph of Mother and Pope John Paul II, chatting with Mother. Blond. Tanned. Radiant. “Whirlybird!” I exclaimed.
She turned to greet me and went wide-eyed. “Jake! I don’t hear anything from you for six months, and now this? What have they done to you? You look terrible!” Her teacup and saucer clattered down on the little wooden table before her.
You should have seen the other guy, I didn’t say. “It’s a longer story than I can relate right now. Dana, you are a genuine vision of paradise.” I took a painful step toward her.
“Hasn’t the consulate sent anyone? I phoned them direct, right after your mother called me.”
“Haven’t heard a word.”
“We’ll see about that! Jake, fond hellos will have to wait. I have to do some things, and there is no time to waste!” And she sprang up and dashed out of the room.
“A charming but impetuous girl,” Mother observed.
*
Two hours later two white-clad orderlies burst into my ward. They piled me on a gurney and rumbled me through the halls and out the door into a waiting U. S. government van. Sirens a-wail, we bullied our way through Calcutta congestion to the American compound. They rolled me into an isolation ward, doused me with industrial-strength disinfectants, pumped me full of antibiotics and every inoculation imaginable, put plaster casts on my wrist and ankle and shot me full of morphine. As I drifted off to dreamland, I entertained the comforting notion that I had a chance of getting out of this mess alive.
*
The next morning found me in less pain and better spirits though a little woozy. I got some food down and was able to make it to the john all right. I awoke from the next night’s deep sleep with fever abated and no more shakes. My wounds showed signs of healing. My appetite had returned. I needed morphine no longer, just a little OxyContin.
My third morning in the isolation ward I was propped up on pillows enjoying a hot cup of coffee when a man in his forties wearing a suit, white shirt and striped tie rapped on the door jamb and stepped in. Well-groomed and earnest, he had “paper pusher” written all over him. “Good morning, Mr. Fonko,” he said in an over-friendly voice. “I’m Payne D’Arse (we’ll call him—I don’t want to derail his career by mentioning his real name) from the American consulate. How are you feeling today?”
“Better than I’ve felt for a long time. I actually think I’m on the mend.”
“Your lab tests came back, and they look good. You’ve nothing contagious or incurable. It was a near thing, though. You arrived here in frightful shape. It’s fortunate your friend, Ms. Wehrli, alerted us to your situation. Naturally we rushed right over. Can’t neglect an American citizen in dire distress, no sir.”
“I appreciate it, I surely do,” I said. “I didn’t fit the profile of the Missionary’s usual customer list very well, and they weren’t geared up for
my particular situation.” Truth be told, their treatment was making everything worse, except possibly my spiritual ennoblement. Her approach may work for the locals, but my immune system was way behind the curve for what it faced in Calcutta.
“Over the last couple days we’ve looked into your case. It seems the Indian authorities were eager to get hold of you. They’d issued a number of APBs and warrants for your arrest: The massacre at the Amritsar Golden Temple. The jailbreaks. The train derailment. The stolen armored car (we were going to return it). Numerous charges of defrauding innkeepers. Simian assault (I hate those monkeys!). The cattle stampede (we intended to eat only one of them, but the herd spooked). The unfortunate fracas at the Chinese border. The riot in Calcutta. Indecent exposure at the Aligaut Temple (it was her idea to try that Kama Sutra position, not mine). The houseboat incident in Srinigar. The mayhem in Uttar Pradesh (that was the Bandit Queen, not me). The hijacked army transport plane. The aborted bombing attempt of the Taj Mahal. (no, dammit, we prevented it!) The altercation with the constables in New Delhi. Indira Gandhi’s assassination (we arrived too late to stop it)…”
“Listen, I can explain…”
“But,” he continued, “Ms. Wehrli hinted that you might have been on a covert assignment, so I took the matter to our chief of station. He asked his colleagues at Langley a few questions, got a few answers, met with his counterpart in Indian Intelligence, and I’m happy to say they worked it out to everyone’s satisfaction, and all is copacetic. As far as the records reflect, Jake Fonko has never set foot in India.”
“I’m relieved to hear that, Mr. D’Arse.” I only wished it were true. “Can you tell me what’s my prognosis? When do I get out of here?”
“Call me Payne, please. They’ll be moving you out of isolation a little later today, but they recommend you stay in hospital a few days longer, at least until the open wounds have all closed up. They’ll put a walking cast on your ankle, and you should be good to go in a week or two.”
“When will I be able to have visitors?”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll personally notify Ms. Wehrli. By the way, when you next see her, you’ll put in a good word for us? Our service, I mean? The way we’ve seen to your needs?”
The hell’s that about? “Sure, Payne—blue ribbon right down the line, I’ll tell her,” I assured him.
*
I luxuriated through my first night in a private room in the recovery ward, woke up much refreshed. The nurse cleared my breakfast dishes away, visiting hours commenced and Dana popped up at my door on the dot.
“Oh, Jake,” she sighed. She rushed over, knelt at my bedside, gently put her hands on me where it didn’t hurt and planted warm kisses on spots that weren’t bandaged or scabbed over. “It broke my heart to see you the other day,” she said. “I had worried about you ever since you left for India, and then to see you looking all beat up was such a shock. Sorry I ran off like that, but I was so pissed off at the people in the consulate! They assured me on the phone they’d take care of you, and they hadn’t done one single thing. I made my driver take me straight over there and stormed into the consul’s office. I gave him my ABC-TV business card and told him I came to Calcutta on an assignment for 20/20. We were considering doing an exposé of incompetence and malfeasance in America’s Foreign Service outposts, I said, and I wanted to sound him out on the concept and any examples of it he knew of. However, the friend I’d told them about over the phone was in serious trouble at a Missionary in the slums, and I couldn’t get on with my assignment until I knew my friend was seen to.
“Well, I might as well have set a bomb off under his chair. He jumped up, ran down the hall, shouted some orders. Went somewhere else and shouted some other orders. Then he came back, picked up his phone and shouted at someone else. Then he apologized until I thought he’d fall down and cry, told me help was on the way, and after that he poured drinks and we had a nice chat about how diligently the Foreign Service attends to its duties and responsibilities. He assured me we wouldn’t find enough of that kind of material to fill out a 20/20 segment. Ha ha! Your mother sure had that bunch pegged.”
Let me backtrack a little. I’d given the consulate the numbers for Mom and Evanston, and Dad. I thought Evanston, my lawyer stepfather, or my journalist father, would know what to do. However, it was Mom who moved the mountain. She’d been indifferent to Dana Wehrli ever since high school and my surfing days. After I streaked Dana’s engagement shower in college, Mom had written her off her A-list permanently. However, last year Mom saw Dana’s name among the credits after a 20/20 exposé of fat farms. Mom has never wavered from her core values—Status, Image and Appearances—and from that moment on she spoke of Dana as her “future daughter-in-law.”
Mom also possesses an unerring instinct for the Levers of Power. Immediately after the consulate’s call she dialed Dana, made a few suggestions and offered to underwrite an emergency trip to Calcutta. Et voila!
I congratulated Dana on her presence of mind and her quick action, thanking her with sincerest gratitude. She asked about my sojourn in India, and I gave her a rough outline, saying that the entire story would emerge in the fullness of time. “Thanks to you, Dana, I’ve been doing fine the last few days. They tell me I can go home in a week or two. How’s your schedule look?”
“I explained the situation to my boss. All my productions are under control, so he told me to use as much vacation time as I needed … and to keep my eyes open for program leads. That Mother lady, for example. We could do a program about her, I bet. The work she’s doing here, alleviating everybody’s misery, that’s a hot topic these days. Or maybe a feature on those amazing Hindu temples—all those weird little statues of gods tangled up together, Walt Disney should eat his heart out. They even have one with an elephant’s head on a man’s body. I’ll stick around until you’re free to leave, Jake, but, boy, that can’t come soon enough for me.”
“Calcutta hasn’t been showing you a good time?”
She rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you about it,” she said.
DANA WEHRLI’S STORY
“I’ve never been in a worse place than this in my whole life,” she began. “I thought Watts and East LA were the bottom, but oooh no! They should send all those people over here, show them how good they have it, maybe they’d quit rioting. I don’t know where they ever got the idea for that musical. Oh Calcutta! must mean some other Calcutta, certainly not this one.
“I took a room in the Oberoi Grand, and that’s okay, sort of like the Beverly Hills Hotel once you get inside. Retro elegance, you know. But the service guys are creepy, you’d think they’d never seen a blonde before, and they have a hand out for a tip for every little thing. I slept okay, and the next morning I thought I’d do some shopping. There’s so much exotic stuff here, and much better quality than Pier One. The gold shops have 22 carat, and the prices make American jewelry stores seem like a bad joke. The concierge tried to steer me to the hotel boutiques, but they have the same ones on Rodeo Drive, big deal. Finally he told me about a government craft emporium that has things from all the Indian states—can you beat that? They have states in India too—but the cab driver didn’t know where it was. So I got out and tried another cab driver. He said he’d take me, but when we got there it was on a crummy side street, and somebody had painted “Government Craft Store” on the wall. So I told him to take me back to the Oberoi.
“I got a city map and located the government emporium, and it turned out it was just two blocks down the road! The cab drivers must have known that—the crooks. So I went out on the street and nearly died from the air. It’s worse than anything in L.A., and the smell, you must have noticed that yourself. The streets were jam-packed with every kind of vehicle I ever saw—cars, bikes, mo-peds, rickshaws, donkey carts, and these big cows just poking along, blocking everything. Old, filthy buses and trollies crept along with people hanging all over outside because they were jam
med full inside. And this in the nice part of town!
“I had to walk two blocks to the store, but they were long blocks, and brother, the crowds on those sidewalks! Big families waddling along six abreast and hogging the whole pavement, men brushing against me and worse, women giving me the look, all kinds of filthy creeps loitering and staring. When I stopped or paused peddlers converged on me, beggars too, little kids tugging on my shirt. Some woman even tried to hand me her baby. It’s like New York City—if you keep moving and look pissed off, people leave you be. I found the shop, you didn’t have to bargain, and they had some darling things, I’ll show you when you get out of here. Some of their fabrics are really beautiful, but I don’t see myself wearing a sari. (Dana, you’d look stunning wearing a trash bag, I thought.)
“That was pretty much my day. Sitars are from India, and the Beatles used one to good effect, so I thought after dinner I’d go to a club and catch some sitar music. Wrong! I didn’t find any clubs I’d want to go into alone. I didn’t even feel safe out on the street, all those creeps with beards and turbans loitering round, staring at me. Anyhow, I had nine hours of jetlag to deal with, so I gave it up and went to bed early.
“The next day the weather was okay, so I thought I’d walk around and see what’s what. There’s a big park across the street, and that would have been okay, except that shabby little men kept pointing out things and then asking for money. They don’t have public toilets, so people were peeing in the bushes. The whole country is a public toilet, I think. I found a restaurant for lunch that looked clean enough. I like chicken tandoori, so I ordered some, and it was even better than that Indian restaurant in Santa Monica we go to. The way people wander around here, anybody goes anywhere, and while I was eating, this strange man came up to my table. He had a sort of sheet draped over him, which could have used a good bleaching, and he had this scraggly grey beard and wild grey hair. He looked like the gurus the rock stars hang around with. He also looked like he could use a square meal. He wasn’t really bothering me, just staring. After he stood there a while I asked him, “Are you a guru?”
The Jake Fonko Series: Books 4, 5 & 6 Page 22
