Part I

1975, Calcutta

Between work assignments my then-wife Laurie and I both managed to get six-month leaves of absence from our jobs—Laurie’s as a picture editor and mine as a television producer—to take a trip eastward around the world. The idea was to recharge our batteries while we had the chance (and just enough savings) to do so. In Hong Kong, my former Time Inc. colleague—the much-beloved writer, correspondent and editor Roy Rowan—insisted that when we got to Calcutta, our next stop, we simply had to look up a talented young Indian reporter for The Times of India as wells as a Time stringer by the name of Sudhir Thapliyal.

“He’ll look after you,” Roy said with what would prove to be a considerable understatement. Having never been to India but believing Calcutta to be a black hole of poverty and pestilence, we had splurged on a room at the Oberoi Grand Calcutta hotel, then the city’s swankiest and most expensive. Alerted by Roy, Sudhir met our flight, drove us to the Oberoi, persuaded the front desk clerk there to cancel our reservation without penalty and took us to a modest hotel costing less than half of what we were to pay at the Oberoi. We would quickly learn that while Calcutta had extraordinary poverty and a homeless population that included countless beggars, it also had vitality, energy and creativity—and a vibrant art scene. “It’s quite safe here,” Sudhir reassured us, gesturing to our spotlessly clean hotel room.

Before he left us to shower and rest, Sudhir said he’d pick us up in two hours for dinner, holding up both hands to indicate he would broke no demurrals. Over our meal in a restaurant of Sudhir’s choosing we learned that he had spent a year in the United States on a fellowship. When we finally said good night well after midnight, he announced he’d pick us up the next morning at 6:30 for breakfast at the Tollygunge Club. “It’s one of the last bastions of the Raj,” he said, “with the best pancakes in the city.”

Sure enough, there he was in the lobby at the appointed time, as perky as a kindergartner at recess. He greeted us like old friends, ushered us into his Ambassador automobile, and off we went for the 20-minute ride to the “Tolly.” On the way, Sudhir explained that the club, spread over 100 acres, dates to 1895 when it was established to promote all manner of sports: golf, tennis and especially equestrian events.

At the Tollygunge we were met by Bill Wright, a dapper British businessman in tweed jacket over jodhpur trousers, who had been forewarned by Sudhir that he would be bringing a “Yank” couple to the club for breakfast, and that the husband was a rider, implying an expertise I sorely lacked.

To my surprise, if not delight, Bill had a mount saddled and ready for me. What could I say? “Uh…terrific,” I stammered.

Off we went over a half-mile course laid out with seven or eight mercifully small jumps, which I took with embarrassingly ungainly form. But I like to think I got points for being game. No matter. The ride over, we hustled off to breakfast on the patio of the two-hundred-year-old clubhouse, where I found Sudhir and Laurie chattering away, oblivious to my death-defying equestrian adventure. At least the pancakes, paired with Darjeeling tea, lived up to Sudhir’s promise.

In those halcyon days I was taking lots of “snaps,” but the phrase “street photography” would have left me scratching my head. Pictures of streets and highways? Looking back at yellowing Calcutta contact sheets from fifty years ago, I see that I did take a few photographs that might qualify as street photography:

a denizen sleeping on a sidewalk cot as a companion washed pots and pans at curbside,

a wedding party I must have stumbled on to,

and an imperious looking gentleman getting his shoes shined, yes, on a street!

But a more colorful vein was tapped when Sudhir introduced us to Gina Narayan, a former London model who had married the Maharajah of the state of Cooch Behar, thereby becoming Cooch Behar’s Maharani.

Gina, as she insisted we call her, had been widowed since her husband died from a polo accident five years before, leaving her in reduced circumstances that nonetheless included a small string of Thoroughbred horses. The best of which, a handsome bay colt with a prominent blaze by the name of Midnight Cowboy, was Calcutta’s racing darling, who in a string of victories had captured the city’s imagination and was closing in on India’s “Horse of the Year” honors.

Now he was facing his biggest test, the Indian Turf Invitation Cup, Calcutta’s premier handicap, held annually at the historic Royal Calcutta Turf Club. The race was just a few days away, and Gina was beside herself in anticipation of it. She graciously invited Sudhir and his new American friends to join her in her box on race day. We felt like we were in a movie.

So, as in a movie, Cowboy not only won the Invitation Cup but did so commandingly. Gina’s exultation proved contagious, not only to us but it seemed to all of Calcutta and beyond.

Varanasi

What, we wondered, could possibly compare to Calcutta? The answer, we soon discovered, was Varanasi, India’s holiest Hindu city and, to a visitor’s eyes, the most otherworldly. With its miles of ghats, or steps, leading to the Ganges river, it is to Varanasi that devout Hindus have been coming for hundreds—thousands?—of years to anoint themselves in its sacred, if now-polluted, waters. Pilgrims believe the Ganges cleanses the soul and washes away sins. More than a million visit the city each year, many of them elderly and ill, travelling there in the belief that to die in Varanasi is to be wiped clean of sin and released from the Hindu cycle of birth and death.

Bombay

In Bombay (now Mumbai) we again availed ourselves of Gina’s generosity and joined her in an owner’s box at Mahalaxmi Racecourse for the running of India’s most prestigious race, the Indian Derby. Since we were still living in a movie, Midnight Cowboy, the odds-on favorite, romped to victory, sealing his “Horse of the Year” selection as well as a secure place in India’s turf history. As for street photography, only one of my Bombay area photographs qualifies. On an excursion to admire the ancient rock-cut temples of the Elephanta Caves, a few miles from the city, I took a picture of a man, his face contorted, sitting beneath eight photographs of shirtless men and a sign reading “Ten Most Wanted Men by Police.” What is the man doing there? Waiting for a bus? And if so, why are photographs of the nation’s most wanted men posted at a bus stop? And is that a human baby lying next to him?

It is a photograph I pondered for nearly half a century before finally concluding that what I once thought might be a baby is instead a helmet, some rags and a cane or umbrella. It may also be the photograph that led me to a pursuit of street photography.

2011, Delhi

Thirty-five years would pass before I would return to India, with my wife Jane, mother of our twin sons, Graham and Wells (now 42 and fathers themselves). I was by then a more determined, if not more accomplished, photographer. Though she had never been to India, the trip was Jane’s idea. She had ulterior motives. Deciding that my turning 70 and completing ten years as editor of Smithsonian signaled a good time to turn the magazine over to someone else, Jane had bought two round-trip tickets to Delhi six months before my 70^th birthday—and my tenth anniversary as Smithsonian’s editor. She suspected that when I reached those two milestones, I’d be ready for five weeks of picture-taking in India. She was right as usual. So much so that no sooner had we reached the apartment we’d rented from Sudhir’s cousin Arvind, than I started taking pictures—of two night watchmen lying down on the job.

The next morning found me on the prowl. I was about to snap a picture of a sleeping fruit-stall proprietor when, a nanosecond before I squeezed the shutter, he opened his eyes to look me over. But how did he know?

The first order of business was to book a trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. After a bit of misdirection as to where we might buy tickets, we found ourselves in a train station throbbing with exhaustion and resignation.

Agra

But after an hour attempting, without success, to buy a ticket to Agra—welcome to India!—we decided to hire a car and driver, which would cost a bit more than the train but now seemed like money well spent. This turned out to be a lucky decision, as our driver knew a back entrance to the Taj, where we would not only avoid the crowds but where I could take a couple of pictures of India’s most famous monument from a different perspective.

Varanasi

Having “captured” the Taj, we flew to Varanasi, which I was eager to show to Jane. I also wanted to prove that my skills had improved since the last time I was there, more than three decades before. We began with the obligatory boat tour down the Ganges, but this time I asked the boatman to go closer to the teeming ghats.

Once off the boat, the alleyways behind the ghats proved almost as intriguing.

Mussoorie

After Varanasi we headed to Mussoorie to visit Sudhir, whom Jane had met when he visited us in upstate New York in the late 1970s. Sudhir had been living in Mussoorie, a hill station north of Delhi in the foothills of the Himalayas, since he traded journalism for writing novels three decades earlier. Arvind had alerted us that Sudhir had been in failing health for some time, but he greeted us with the warmth I remembered. (Sadly, two months later we would learn that Sudhir had succumbed to the disease he had been battling for years.)

Jaipur

We’d spent two days and nights with Sudhir before bidding him goodbye and heading for “the pink city” of Jaipur, its color due to an 1887 law passed decreeing that buildings be painted terracotta pink, a symbol of hospitality believed to be British Queen Victoria’s favorite color. Of the Indian cities I’ve been to, Jaipur remains my favorite. Even with a population of three million people, making it the country’s tenth largest city, it somehow seems manageable, not as overwhelming as, say, Kolkata or Delhi. No surprise that it’s been called the “Paris of India” and the “Island of Glory.”

I also love the friendliness of its people, their optimism and ingenuity, despite the desperate poverty that pervades parts of the city.

Kerala

From Jaipur it was on to Kerala, the tropical state at India’s southern tip, known for its palm-lined beaches, and its monster Lake Vembanad, whose hundreds of houseboats offer visitors an overnight mystery tour of the backwater canals.

Tea, coffee, spice and banana plantations are grown on its mountain slopes, and wildlife sanctuaries support elephants, monkeys—even tigers.

Mumbai

In Mumbai, our last stop before heading home, we stayed in the former Royal Bombay Yacht Club, a bit run-down and in need of some tender loving care, but our room offered a spectacular view of the Gateway to India, the monument completed in 1924 to commemorate the visit of King George V, the first British monarch to visit the nation, for his 1911 coronation as Emperor of India.