THE LEOPARD'S CALL

The night before we left our beloved home on the edge of the wilderness was also filled with memories.  We slept on the floor for our beds had been loaded onto a Mercedes-Benz truck to be carried up to the River Ganges, then across the big river by paddle steamer where another truck would take it to our destination at Poona many days from here.  Now, on the cool floor of our small one-bedroom cottage, Norma and I talked late into the night as we had so often done.  Before us was a long journey by train.  Outside, in the guava orchard the Jungle Nightjar kept calling in a steady loud rhythm lasting several minutes at a time.  Chuckoo,chuckoo, chuckoo…tuck,tuck,.tuck   Then the howls of a pack of jackals in our vegetable garden rose up as if to wish us goodbye.  How often I have driven them when they fed on our ripe pineapples or attacked our large flock of hens.  "If we don’t succeed at Spicer," I told Norma before she dropped off to sleep, "I’m coming back here to Falakata."  We finally fall asleep in each other’s arms.  How enriched our lives had become by this adventure to Falakata.  This place would always influence our lives and our thinking.  To this spot, in our minds, we would often return.  In life, I would find that even if I got into a conversation with a stranger, where we exchanged our stories, Falakata quickly came up. 

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That morning as we pulled out in the school’s yellow jeep for the trip to the station, our students were all there to shake our hands and to kiss the children and promised to see us at Spicer College.  We had grown close to these tribal boys and girls from the high plateau of Chota Nagpur, from the tea gardens of Bengal and the Himalayan hills.  They were all from rare tribes, speaking ancient languages, which a linguist would love to hear and study.  Here we heard these tongues all through the day.  Norma and I often laughed at the quaint idioms.  "The sand has eaten my toes," was how they described in their tongue, the itchy fungus of athletes’ foot.  Now we had come to the final moment when it was time to wave goodbye as our jeep slowly left the cluster of our students and staff behind.  Norma and I were crying for we knew we might never see this beautiful place again.

            The yellow jeep reached the black hard-top road from Falakata and we looked long and hard at the buildings as they slowly retreated from us:  the yellow school building with its chapel and classrooms, the big red barn on the farm, the silver roof of my press, and the carpentry, and metal workshops.  Students and teachers, working long and hard, with no thoughts of overtime or extra pay, had built it all.  Suddenly, it was all behind and now only the unknown future stretched out before us.  But as our jeep sped along toward the station with our four children and the things we would need for the long journey, we knew that often we would look back to this road and to the school to which it led.  In the years to come we would have something to tell our children and their children. "Tell us a story about your life in India, grandpa or grandma," they may say, and we will tell them of Falakata.  In the Washington Post of July 22, 2001, a short piece I wrote about this place appeared in a Sunday column titled "Life is Short: Autobiography as Haiku."  I wrote then: "My wife and I spent the happiest years of our life teaching at an agricultural high school on the border between Indian and Bhutan.  It was a simple life: no electricity, a hand pump for water and one telephone for all.  One day after our meal I gave my children a treat of peanuts.  There weren’t many peanuts in the can and I informed my four children that they would each get just a few that day.  My oldest son, Mike, just five, happily placed his little hands around his share, and looking up at me proudly announced, "Daddy, today I have lots of little!"