I’ve been reading Ravi’s and my letters to one another over the decades and they do more than remind me of our life together; they tell me things forgotten and otherwise lost. Two I picked up yesterday have my mind filled with memories of a series of events that lead to a turning point for my life, and therefore for Ravi’s as well, and I find myself analyzing the events in a way beyond me at the time.
Our letters, numbering in the scores, are one part of the conversation that Ravi and I began the moment we met. We exchanged observations, shared ideas, puzzled together over things that disturbed us or we thought curious, and the dialogue continued nonstop until the end, even when angry with one another. The continual discussion was critical to our love and our friendship. It taught me that he had an extraordinary mind and it made him aware that I, just like he, to be happy and fulfilled, needed a larger, meaningful engagement in life outside home and family. I needed, much as he, to act on the beliefs concerning social justice we held together, in doing what I could for persons around us and for all people. Most men of our generation, and certainly a man from India, would have expected me to be content to step back, as a wife, and let him act on my behalf, but he married me, knowing me. We began as graduate students together and three years later had a son, then a daughter and his brother from Bombay. While Ravi went on to the Ph.D., I managed to finish my M.A. and teach as Lecturer, part-time, in the university where he was Professor. We lived, worked, had friends and colleagues together in the world of academia, popularly known in those days as the Ivory Tower. Even while living in Mogadiscio and Ankara the closeness continued. In Ankara I had a research grant from USAID and a Turkish Ministry, affiliated with Ravi’s university, all of which was part-time to keeping a home together and functioning, and with the boy from Mogadiscio having joined our family, for our three kids.
From 1972 to 1976, Ravi and I lived apart. The children needed a stable situation for their schooling and he needed a change of career, to find work that required more of him, work that used his wit, charm, quick and acute sense of how people respond to situations, that made relevant his fluent English, French and Hindi, conversational Spanish and Portuguese, even some German. He was the consummate diplomat. By 1974 he had moved to Paris and become an international civil servant in an international organization. By then the two younger children and I had been in the States for two years, living near Chicago and they were attending an excellent high school. Our older boy was in college. I had given up on the Ph.D. and instead did an M.B.A. in hospital/health services, followed by a few months of hospital administration and a year working in a national public health program.
By 1976 the children were ready for college and the older boy had finished his M.B.A. Once again I closed our home to set it up elsewhere, this time in Paris — without the children at its center.
In our Paris home, Ravi and I, as usual, discussed and analyzed his work; I found it interesting and significant. I knew and liked his colleagues, held dinners and parties for him and participated in many of his organization’s activities. I also, after putting our apartment in shape and after months of French lessons, looked into possibilities for employment in Paris. Between the two years of my MBA I had done a summer internship in hospital management at the American Hospital in Paris, but the MBA had no meaning there, and besides, I hardly fit their profile for such a job, so that was hopeless, as was finding a position in one of the pharmaceutical companies, or certainly, in the French health care system. (I sometimes wished I were a schoolteacher. Teachers are employable anywhere.) No longer needed at home for the children, I began contacting U.S. and U.N. based organizations with health care projects in developing countries, which is where I wanted to be, anyhow. In the meantime, for my social life, I became a regular at the Paris universities’ social science library, keeping informed on research related to my intended new field, international public health, and spent much of my time with graduate students and visiting scholars.
Without realizing it, I had entered a new phase of our marriage and would pull Ravi along with me. I suspect a good many mothers take on a changed identity when children leave the nest, and maybe many a husband is confronted with an unexpectedly changed wife. We were no longer a young family. And despite all our traveling back and forth and being together for as much time as possible, the four years apart had changed us all, but the children and me far more than Ravi. During that time I had shared household responsibilities with teenagers, not a husband, focused totally on their needs and on our schooling. Ravi had lived alone, without a home. Some men would experience being single again as freedom; I think Ravi did not. In his culture, “bachelor” did not carry a positive connotation. (For an explanation, see “Ravi and His Identity as a Householder”, here.)
My first consultancy for a primary health care project came in early 1978, for Indonesia, a country totally unfamiliar to me and to Ravi. It would be my first time working, thinking, acting in an environment away from him. Later, when I did a consultancy or a research project in Turkey or in India, he usually traveled there with me to see the place and the people. Indonesia was too far from Paris for that. And yet more unsettling, I went to Bali. Everyone falls in love with Bali and I even more so. I write, beginning here, about why and how Bali is such an extraordinary peasant society and culture. The Balinese dancer and gamelan orchestra shown here are performing in a beautiful folk tradition for a tourist audience.
Back to our letters, this one from Ravi, written on his official stationary in 1975 — “I am sitting in my office and it is 9:30 p.m. and I’ll be damned if I can think of anything else except that you and the kids will be here next week. … This has been a busy – but not unusual day. I spent the morning at a meeting we have organized on use of computers in the evaluation of the National Rate of Return on Irrigation Project Investments. I suppose that is when I first began to think of you today. Seven countries represented and all they talked about was linear programming models. And I used to think that international relations and development questions were glamourous!! I got back to the office at 1 p.m. and the morning mail had to be read (and he details the negotiations and politics over several projects) Right after that I got 3 phone calls from the States – though none from you. (and two pages about the day’s work, about the children, plus warning me, once again, to slow down and live in the present.)”
Someone took these photos for me in Bali, maybe because I was so obviously enjoying it all. I am with the Bali village development program team, walking with the health center staff and sitting with the volunteers at a ceremony. I wrote this letter in Jakarta, 1980, to Ravi in Paris – “Your letter of July 5 – all about my acquiring knowledge unknown to you, becoming a totally different person, you being marginalizé des chose and all that jazz – Nonsense!! The way I chatter on and on and on you will know everything within hours and don’t I always bring the people home with me? Like Oemi (she just arrived in Jakarta) and Widjanarko and Inne and Akile and now Loung-I (who even told someone that he is my son by a Chinese husband) and Lucas and the Kerns and Subyakto and his wife. They will all show up in our home one day. Funny, you didn’t feel left out of my MBA, though I must admit this is more fun. … …” The rest of the letter is about the children and their concerns and my next day’s meetings.
While I was in Bali Ravi bought a large book on Bali, with lots of pretty pictures. In 1990 he arranged to attend a conference that took him to Thailand because, I am convinced, I had spent a week in Bangkok on the way back from Indonesia and he wanted to see what I had seen.
I found a letter I wrote to Ravi while doing a study in a town north of Bangalore. It records my feelings about where I thought we should settle – and it was not what he had in mind. I wrote some of that in “Where Does an Expatriate Go to Retire,” here. The letter has me remembering and regretting.
And I found your blog… Down memory lane
Thank you. As I wrote and showed in a May, 2014 photo I took of women health workers, “Pleasant Memories — Encounters in India,” I also loved working in India.
Vous avez eu (et avez) une vie si belle et si riche. Extraordinaire.. Seulement possible grace a cet amour si profond qui s’ est tranforme en de si belles choses construites (et vos enfants bien sur) au fil de ces annees. Je suis francais, ma femme est japonaise. On habite au Colorado depuis maintes annees. J’ aurais voulu avoir une vie comme la votre, allant dans d’ autres pays pour y travailler et vivre mais je n’ ai pas eu la volonte de le faire et pour d’ autres raisons. Je vous admire. Votre mari doit sourire,de joie et de serenitee, en lisant votre blog depuis quelque part dans les etoiles. Eric
I am pleased you find my marriage relevant to your own. With you French, your wife Japanese and settled in America, you have a rich and complex life to live together. Some day you will travel. The expatriate life is still out there, although different from Ravi’s and mine.
I began writing to explore parts of our life together that we were too busy and involved in at the time to even want to understand. The memoir is my final journey, one that has led me to wonderful discoveries, one of which was the critical part romantic love played in our cross-cultural marriage and expatriate lifestyle. You may have read this in the essay I wrote last November, in “Romantic Love, Cross-Cultural Marriage and the movie trilogy “Before Sunrise”, “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.” I wrote in response to Victoria’s observations on the nature of marriage throughout human history, and I commented further in “The Japanese Wife.” Romantic love is the spark that ignites the relationship but cannot be sustained unless the two are particularly well matched and conscious of the special friendship that holds them together. We in our cross-cultural marriages rely on that awareness rather than on a comfortable sharing of background and inherited understandings.
I hope you are right that Votre mari doit sourire,de joie et de serenitee, en lisant votre blog depuis quelque part dans les etoiles
— that Ravi is smiling, happy and serene as he reads my blog from wherever he resides among the stars.