We are staying on the grounds of St. Xavier – grounds, by the way, bounded with high fences topped with wire and guarded gates. Carole and I are in the Jesuit residence. She is in a guest room, while I occupy a room normally housing one of the Jesuits who is currently absent. The students are in dorms; girl’s dorms and boy’s dorms. We all eat together with the Jesuits. Sometimes holding our own conversation, and at other times the two groups join.
As I was on the last visit, I am struck by how welcoming the Jesuit fathers are. They filled Carol and me in on what they are doing, including the sad news of the death just last week of the retired Bishop who stayed with them. He was 90, they said, and died peacefully in his sleep. But we were enthusiastically welcomed and introduced to a couple of new members of the community. As one who researches community, it’s fascinating to see how this group of men form a community based around their church and their avocation of teaching and research.
At Ahmedabad, a representative of St. Xavier was awaiting us. He had been there since 6 a.m., and it was now a little after 1. The ride to the college was in two vans, and our students were introduced to India’s roads. Words cannot describe the organized chaos of this traffic. Among other things noted from our van were the constant beeping of horns used as warning devices meaning that a vehicle is coming into the space of another with no intention of stopping or slowing, donkey-carts, bicycles, motorized rickshaws, busses, beggars, automobiles, cows, many trucks, including one rising high above the rest of the traffic filled with green melons and topped with a layer of humans, a camel cart, and much, much more. The other van had to pass an elephant.
One of the students even clearly held his breath was our van merged into solid streams of traffic coming from two other directions at a T-intersection with nothing more than a steady beeping from the horn merging into the constant clamor from other vehicles. We made it easily, clearing the truck by at least four inches and not running down the Vespa driver who was inexplicitly driving at about one-fourth the speed of the rest of the traffic. It did fit with our adventure theme.
It's my second time here, but the traffic is just as baffling as it was the first time. Love it.
And speaking about the fog . . . I’ve never lived in London but have read enough novels to realize that the fog there is unlike our midwestern fogs. This fog matched the literary poetry of describing London fogs. It did seem alive, swirling into the airport whenever a door was opened like it had form and purpose. It also was far colder than our fogs, which seem to come mostly in the summer. The airline representative checking our boarding passes wore her uniform (a sari) covered with a blanket, then a parka with a scarf bundled around her face and head. And she still seemed cold.
A few thoughts about waiting on an airport tarmac for this long. I was amazed at how accepting the passengers were. Most slept or quietly read, with the exception of the businessman. But even he stayed the course, flying on to Ahmedabad with us. The small child stayed quiet for the most part. She cried at one point, but quietly and was quickly soothed by her mother. I got the impression that this delay wasn’t an unusual event, which makes sense looking at the geography of Delhi, which is very low-lying around a river delta in a semi-tropical part of India. Since the only two times I’ve found myself in Delhi in the early morning the area was bathed in fog, I suspect it’s the norm, not the exception. For the Marquette crew, it was more of the same: sleeping, working on papers or blogs, reading. Mostly sleeping. This has been a very long journey.
