Jimmy Carter & Manmohan Singh:

by Rajan Philips

Jimmy Carter, the 39th US President, died on Sunday, December 29, at the ripe old age of 100 years, in Plains, a small, rural town in Georgia, where he was born and lived his pre and post political life. Three days prior and across the world, Manmohan Singh, India’s 13th Prime Minister, passed away in New Delhi. Dr. Singh was 92 years old. Carter served as President for four years from 1977 to 1981, 23 years before Manmohan Singh began his two-term tenure (2004-2014) as India’s Prime Minister.

The two leaders were in office nearly 25 years apart, and they led the world’s two largest constitutional democracies that are also culturally and historically vastly different. Yet their lives and their time in politics are remarkable for what they had in common as political leaders and what differentiated them from both their predecessors and their successors. They both had humble beginnings but went on to excel in education and professional careers before entering politics. And as political leaders, they were simple, sincere, honest and have left behind an inspiring legacy of high conduct.

Jimmy Carter was the son of a Southern Baptist peanut farmer who took over the breakeven family farm, modernized it into a profiting commercial enterprise and became a millionaire farmer. He used his new status to become active in local matters and to leap into politics calling for racial equality and tolerance predicated on his deep Christian faith. He became State Senator (1963-1967), Governor of Georgia (1971-1975), and by 1974 declared himself to be a primary candidate for Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. He was the most religious of all American presidents but always kept his religion separate from the affairs of the state.

Before taking over the family farm after his father’s death, Carter was an Electrical Engineer in the US navy and was among the early corps of officers who were trained in submarine and nuclear submarine programs. As a 28 year old Navy Lieutenant in 1952, Carter was part of a team of American nuclear reactor specialists who were despatched to Canada to deal with at the world’s first nuclear reactor meltdown at the Chalk River nuclear power station in Canada. Carter and his colleagues were lowered into the reactor vessel, taking turns of 90 second duration each to limit exposure to radiation, until they dismantled the reactor.

Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 was justifiably seen as bringing closure to America’s political agony in the wake of the Watergate scandal at home and the Vietnam withdrawal that was a humbling lesson on the limits of American power abroad. Carter’s predecessors were Richard Nixon whom everyone in America wanted out of the White House, and Gerald Ford who succeeded Nixon after his involuntary resignation over Watergate. Carter was succeeded four years later by Ronald Reagan, America’s one and only actor president, who did not have any of Nixon’s political smarts but had grown by default to become the poster boy for the American right, exuding Hollywood charm embellished by scripted eloquence.

In between Nixon-Ford and Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter unfolded his one-term presidency. After losing to Ronald Reagan (who became the Republican candidate in his third try after failing badly against Nixon in 1968 and coming up close to Ford in 1976), in 1980, Jimmy Carter co-founded with his wife Rosalynn a new life of humanitarian and human rights activism that had lasted the full 44 years of his post-presidency. The institutions the Carters set up will continue long after them in Georgia and around the world in true testament to their conjugal partnership of faith, love, labour and service that lasted 77 years, well past the biblical milestone for individual human life.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of his post-presidential service is the near eradication of the scourge of guinea worm in many parts of the world purely through the systematic spread of clean living practices without the miracle of a vaccine. The Carter Centre has to-date monitored nearly 115 elections around the world and Mr. & Mrs. Carter have physically contributed to the building of homes for the homeless in partnership with Habitat for Humanity.

Carter as President

A commonplace observation has been that Jimmy Carter was a successful ex-president after being a not so successful president. In fact, at the time of his defeat in 1980 the Carter presidency was seen as a failure. Fortunately for him, President Carter lived long enough to see biographers and historians revisiting his presidency and presenting it in a far more favourable light in the long sweep of history and amidst contemporary exigencies.

Carter presided over many bold initiatives – on social welfare, civil rights, diversity, resources, energy, education, and pragmatic (not ideological) deregulation. On the economy, it was Carter who started the fight against inflation and signalled his intentions in July 1979 by appointing Paul Volcker to head the Federal Reserve. Volcker was a hawkish advocate for raising interest rates, and his treatment worked as inflation that rose to 14.8% in 1980 fell to below 3% within three years. Reagan kept Volcker on the job and claimed credit for lowering the inflation.

On the external front, Carter made human rights the corner stone of his foreign policy, facilitated the Camp David Accords that cemented a lasting peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, successfully negotiated the hitherto elusive Panama Canal Treaty, and established formal diplomatic relations with China and forged a personal rapport with China’s post-Mao reformist Deng Xiaoping. His Achilles’ heel proved to be the Iran hostage crisis that began in November 1979 when Iranian militants seized the US embassy in Tehran and held as many as 60 US officials hostages for 444 days.

The immediate provocation for hostage taking was the admission of the deposed Shah of Iran to the US for medical treatment. It is known that Carter only reluctantly agreed to allow the Shah to enter the US for medical treatment, and that he (Carter) had been the target of Republican and media criticism in the US for his Administration’s reluctance to support Shah against the Iranian revolution.

On the day President Carter died, The Times of Israel published a vitriolic article by Efran Fard, recounting a whole litany of contemporary criticisms of Carter’s Iranian policy. None more critical than Ronald Reagan who called Carter’s policy “a historical stain in American history.” Some history, some reading! Yet it was Reagan who once again was enabled to declare victory by the revolutionary Iranian government that chose to free the American hostages on January 20, 1981, the day Carter left office and Reagan began his presidency.

It was the Carter Administration that had negotiated the terms for releasing the hostages with Algerian mediation. But Tehran would rather have Carter defeated in the November 1980 election and Reagan elected as President. In his unfriendly obituary article, Efran Fard rekindles old dichotomies, calling the Obama presidency vis-à-vis Iran as “Carter 2”, and the Biden presidency as “Carter 3.” He ends his piece with the wish that Carter’s death “will mark the end of these misguided policies,” and the assertion that “the world first faced the rise of Islamic radicalism during Carter’s era, and the battle against terrorism continues to this day.”

Fard’s article makes no mention of Trump who ended Obama’s ‘Carter 2’ and is now set to deal with Biden’s ‘Carter 3.’ Trump was a fierce critic of Carter during the campaign for the November election, mockingly comparing the rise of inflation under Carter then and under Biden now, as well as taking Carter to task for the Panama Canal agreement he signed. Unlike Fard, however, Trump has been gracious about Carter after his death, offering Carter his “highest respect,” and is planning to attend the state funeral for Carter that President Biden has ordered.

Before the November presidential election, President Carter has made it known that he would cast his vote for Kamala Harris in spite of his physical condition. His death during the last days of the Biden presidency gives Democrats the chance to celebrate Carter’s life and relinquish office on a high moral note. Truth be told, the positions that Trump is articulating now – on inflation, immigration, abortion, education, the environment, and foreign policy including the Panama Canal Treaty – are all echoes of the positions articulated by Ronald Reagan in his campaign against Jimmy Carter.

Reagan was certainly far less coarse and far more charming than Trump. There is nothing compassionate about Trump and he never pretends to be what he is not. And Carter did not have to pretend that he was compassionate about others. That was his nature and nurtured it to perfection to the very end. His long tenure as ex-president makes him almost impossible to be emulated by any presidential aspirant. But he will remain the lodestar of American politics, exemplifying the power of a positive example and not the example of power.

(To be continued)

Manmohan Singh’s 2005 acceptance speech of Oxford doctorate

People of Indian origin are the single largest component

Today is a very emotional day for me. Oxford brings back many fond memories that I cherish. For this reason, as much as for the intrinsic value of the honour you bestow upon me, I am truly overwhelmed. I am grateful to you, Mr. Chancellor, and to your colleagues, for this honour. I have had the good fortune of receiving several honorary degrees. However, there can be nothing more valuable or precious than receiving an honorary degree from one’s own alma mater. To be so honoured by a university where one has burnt the proverbial midnight oil to earn a regular degree, is a truly most fulfilling experience. I thank you for it. This is a day I will truly cherish.

The world has changed beyond recognition since I was a student here. Yet, some age-old problems endure. Developing countries have found a new voice, a new status and have acquired a new sense of confidence over the last few decades. As an Indian, I see a renewed sense of hope and purpose. This new optimism gives us Indians a sense of self-confidence and this shapes our worldview today. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that the success of hundreds of young Indian students and professionals in Universities like Oxford, and elsewhere across the world, has contributed a great deal to this renewed self-confidence of a new resurgent India.

The economics we learnt at Oxford in the 1950s was also marked by optimism about the economic prospects for the post-War and post-colonial world. But in the 1960s and 1970s, much of the focus of development economics shifted to concerns about the limits to growth. There was considerable doubt about the benefits of international trade for developing countries. I must confess that when I returned home to India, I was struck by the deep distrust of the world displayed by many of my countrymen. We were influenced by the legacy of our immediate past. Not just by the perceived negative consequences of British imperial rule, but also by the sense that we were left out in the cold by the Cold War.

There is no doubt that our grievance against the British Empire had a sound basis. As the painstaking statistical work of the Cambridge historian Angus Maddison has shown, India’s share of world income collapsed from 22.6% in the year 1700, almost equal to Europe’s share of 23.3% at that time, to as low as 3.8% in 1952. Indeed, at the beginning of the 20th Century, “the brightest jewel in the British Crown” was the poorest country in the world in terms of per capita income. However, what is significant about the Indo-British relationship is the fact that despite the economic impact of colonial rule, the relationship between individual Indians and Britons, even at the time of our Independence, was relaxed and, I may even say, benign.

This was best exemplified by the exchange that Mahatma Gandhi had here at Oxford in 1931 when he met members of the Raleigh Club and the Indian Majlis. The Mahatma was in England then for the Round Table Conference and during its recess, he spent two weekends at the home of A.D. Lindsay, then the Master of Balliol. At this meeting, the Mahatma was asked: “How far would you cut India off from the Empire?” His reply was precise – “From the Empire, completely; from the British nation not at all, if I want India to gain and not to grieve.” He added, “The British Empire is an Empire only because of India. The Emperorship must go and I should love to be an equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows. But it must be a partnership on equal terms.” This remarkable statement by the Mahatma has defined the basis of our relationship with Britain.

Jawaharlal Nehru echoed this sentiment when he urged the Indian Constituent Assembly in 1949 to vote in favour of India’s membership of the Commonwealth. Nehru set the tone for independent India’s relations with its former master when he intervened in the Constituent Assembly’s debate on India joining the Commonwealth and said:

“I wanted the world to see that India did not lack faith in herself, and that India was prepared to co-operate even with those with whom she had been fighting in the past provided the basis of the co-operation today was honourable, that it was a free basis, a basis which would lead to the good not only of ourselves, but of the whole world. That is to say, we would not deny that co-operation simply because in the past we had fought and thus carry on the trail of our past karma along with us. We have to wash out the past with all its evil.” Thus spoke the first Prime Minister of India.

India and Britain set an example to the rest of the world in the way they sought to relate to each other, thanks to the wisdom and foresight of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. When I became the Finance Minister of India in 1991, our Government launched the Indo-British Partnership Initiative. Our relationship had by then evolved to a stage where we had come to regard each other as genuine partners. Today, there is no doubt in my mind that Britain and India are indeed partners and have much in common in their approach to a wide range of global issues.

What impelled the Mahatma to take such a positive view of Britain and the British people even as he challenged the Empire and colonial rule? I believe it was, undoubtedly, his recognition of the elements of fair play that characterized so much of the ways of the British in India. Consider the fact that an important slogan of India’s struggle for freedom was that “Self Government is more precious than Good Government”. That, of course, is the essence of democracy. But the slogan suggests that even at the height of our campaign for freedom from colonial rule, we did not entirely reject the British claim to good governance. We merely asserted our natural right to self-governance.

Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India’s experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization of India met the dominant Empire of the day. These are all elements which we still value and cherish. Our judiciary, our legal system, our bureaucracy and our police are all great institutions, derived from British-Indian administration and they have served our country exceedingly well.
The idea of India as enshrined in our Constitution, with its emphasis on the principles of secularism, democracy, the rule of law and, above all, the equality of all human beings irrespective of caste, community, language or ethnicity, has deep roots in India’s ancient culture and civilization. However, it is undeniable that the founding fathers of our Republic were also greatly influenced by the ideas associated with the age of enlightenment in Europe. Our Constitution remains a testimony to the enduring interplay between what is essentially Indian and what is very British in our intellectual heritage.

The idea of India as an inclusive and plural society draws on both these traditions. The success of our experiment of building a democracy within the framework of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious society will encourage I believe all societies to walk the path we have trodden. In this journey, and this is an exciting journey, both Britain and India have learnt from each other and have much to teach the world. This is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the Indo-British encounter.

It used to be said that the sun never sets on the British Empire. I am afraid we were partly responsible for sending that adage out of fashion! But, if there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set, it is the world of the English speaking people, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component.

Of all the legacies of the Raj, none is more important than the English language and the modern school system. That is, of course, if you leave out cricket! Of course, people here may not recognize the language we speak, but let me assure you that it is English! In indigenizing English, as so many people have done in so many nations across the world, we have made the language our own. Our choice of prepositions may not always be the Queen’s English; we might occasionally split the infinitive; and we may drop an article here and add an extra one there. I am sure everyone will agree, nevertheless, that English has been enriched by Indian creativity as well and we have given you back R.K. Narayan and Salman Rushdie. Today, English in India is seen as just another Indian language.

No Indian has paid a more poetic and generous tribute to Britain for the totality of this inheritance than Rabindranath Tagore. In the opening lines of his world-famous, Nobel Prize winning epic Gitanjali, Gurudev says:
“The West has today opened its door./There are treasures for us to take.
We will take we will also give,/From open shores of India’s immense humanity.”

To see the India – British relationship as one of ‘give and take’, at the time when he first did so, was an act of courage and statesmanship. It was, however, also an act of great foresight. As we look back and also look ahead, it is clear that the Indo-British relationship is one of ‘give and take’. The challenge before us today is to see how we can take this mutually beneficial relationship forward in an increasingly inter-dependent and globalized world that we live in.

I wish to end by returning to my alma mater. Oxford, since the 19th century, has been a centre for Sanskrit learning and the study of Indian culture. The Chancellor has recalled many more numerous instances of that. Boden professorship in Sanskrit, and the Spalding professorship in Eastern Religions and Ethics, stand testimony to this university’s commitment to India and Indian culture. I recall with pride the fact that the Spalding professorship was held by two very distinguished Indians: Dr S. Radhakrishnan, who later became the President of India, and by Dr. Bimal Krishna Matilal.

In the context of the study and preservation of Indian culture, I also wish to recall the contribution of another great Oxonian, Lord Curzon, about whose project to preserve and restore Indian monuments, Jawaharlal Nehru himself said, “After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”

Many of those who were to rule India set course from Oxford. Some stayed behind to become India’s friends. Men like Edward Thompson, Verrier Elwin and many others are remembered in India for their contribution to the enrichment of our life and society.

I always come back to the city of dreaming spires and of lost causes as a student. Mr. Chancellor, I am here this time in all humility as the representative of a great nation and a great people. I am beholden to you and to my old university for the honour that I have received today.

Thank you!

(Excerpted from Falling Leaves, an anthology of memoirs by LC Arulpragasam)

Having lived in Italy for many years, we planned a trip to Sicily in April 1975. The idea was met with some alarm among our Sri Lankan friends, since Sicily at that time was cursed with mafia kidnaps and killing. I replied laughingly: ‘what self-respecting mafioso would waste his time kidnapping a poor Sri Lankan?’ We planned to travel with our two younger children (aged 10 and 8 years) in our caravan (trailer/roulotte) to be towed by our trusty old Peugeot 404 station wagon. It was to be a long drive – a total of around 1,000 miles, including travel within Sicily. We reckoned that the countryside would be green, with the fields fresh with the flowers of spring. What we left out of our calculation was the powerful scirocco, the scorching wind that comes blistering out of the deserts of Africa, bringing the sand of the desert even into Sicily.

An interesting geographic feature of Italy is its north-south disposition, making it one of the ‘longest’ countries in Europe, relative to area. This has had the result of it being blessed with wide agro-climatic variations, starting from the ice-bound Alps in the north, to arid Sicily near the African desert in the south. One is struck by the growing barrenness, due to poor rainfall and poorer soils, as one goes southwards towards Sicily. This was matched in those days by pervasive poverty as one proceeded farther south to Eboli, immortalized in Carlo Levi’s book: ‘Christ stopped at Eboli’: because he did not have the heart to go any farther, due to the pervasive poverty and inaccessibility.

In crossing the straits of Messina by car-ferry, we got a glimpse of the Aeolian Islands, especially of Vulcano, the island closest to us. These islands, immortalized by Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, were home to Aeolus the God of the Winds, to Vulcan the God of Fire and to the one-eyed Cyclops. Although I wished to see these fabled isles, I knew that in the 1970s they contained little more than volcanoes, sea and sand! But fast-forwarding to today, although the island is full of sun-loving tourists in summer, they are gone by summer’s end, leaving only the cooks and security persons of the hotels behind – and they are 80 per cent of Sri Lankan origin! Thus it has come to pass that Sri Lankans are in charge of the home of Vulcan, the Fire God – if only for the winter!

This is not intended to be a travelogue; so I shall only briefly describe the most impressionable things we saw in Sicily. The most beautiful above all is Taormina, on the eastern coast. The centre-piece is the old Greek amphitheatre which was later enlarged and embellished by the Romans. One can never forget this view, looking down through the white marble pillars of the amphitheater across the brilliant blue of the Aegean Sea with the backdrop of snow-capped Mt. Etna, spewing smoke by day and glowing orange-red at night. The foreground is framed by Greek pillars, choked in a welter of wild flowers: white and yellow daisies, bloodied by the flame of red poppies in spring. It is one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring sights in the world.

From there we travelled along the eastern seaboard to Siracusa (Syracuse). This was one of the centres of ancient Greek civilization and part of Magna Graecia or Greater Greece. Plato and Aristotle were long-term visitors here, while it was also the home of Archimedes and the site of his famous ‘eureka’ moment. From Siracusa we drove to Agrigento, another centre of Greek civilization in Italy. It was a noble city, with white-marbled Greek temples on a ridge of hills overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea, justly named the Valley of the Temples. It must have been an impressive sight for Greek travelers to see from the sea this line of temples, decked in white marble, trimmed with gold lining, glimmering in the morning or evening sun. We were allowed to park among the temple ruins by a kind policeman, thus managing to live among these grand ruins for two days, an experience that would be just impossible today. Thus, we were in the temple of Concorde at sunrise watching the sun rise over the Tyrrhenian Sea, while we watched it setting over the mountains from the temple of Juno. We sat in the white-marbled temples in the silence of the moonlight, with only the light-dappled sea lapping on the shore below. It still remains one of our most treasured memories.

From Agrigento (on the southern coast), we cut across the heartland of Sicily, through its barren mountains and poverty-stricken countryside towards Palermo, the capital. These wild mountains are the home of some of the bloodiest mafia clans, including the Corleone family, depicted in the movie, ‘The Godfather’. It is these barren hills that spawned the great Italian migration to New York, which unfortunately also carried with it the poisonous seeds of the mafia.

Cutting across this Sicilian heartland, we arrived in Palermo, the capital city. The cathedrals in Palermo and Monreale take one’s breath away! This part of the world has passed through many imperial and cultural hands: the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Goths, the Byzantine Empire, the Arabs, the Normans, the French, the Spanish and other powers of Christendom. What was left behind in Sicily is layer-upon-layer of a very rich, tolerant and vibrant culture that has endured to this day. Having been brainwashed by British history books in colonial Ceylon, I learned with some surprise that the most tolerant and enlightened rulers of all the above were the Muslim Arabs. For it was the Arab rule of 200 years that ushered in the greatest period of peace and tolerance for all religions, especially under the rule of Sala-uddin (Saladin) the Saracen, much-reviled in British history books. On the contrary, it was the Normans and the plundering Christian kings who epitomized the rapaciousness and savagery of the crusades, while later the Catholic Church, through its Inquisition, was to make short shrift of the Jews and Muslims. As for monuments, the main Muslim mosques were made into churches and cathedrals – of which the cathedrals of Palermo and Monreale are the most magnificent. The mosaics and marble carvings in the latter were done mainly by Moslem craftsmen, whose delicate filigree work and in-laid floral designs are matched only by the Moorish remains in Grenada and the Taj Mahal in India.

We had now spent almost two weeks in Sicily and were congratulating ourselves on how lucky we had been on this trip, in terms of weather, places visited, and costs incurred. But at this point, misfortune struck. It came in the form of a scirocco, the blistering wind that comes out of the deserts of Africa in April, scorching Sicilian crops and choking the air with desert sand. On our last lap along the northern coastal road from Palermo to Messina, we had chosen to take the new autostrada so as to avoid the traffic on the lower coastal road. Whereas the latter hugged the curves on the coast, the autostrada rode boldly on the ridge of the mountains. But bowling along on this exposed autostrada, I began to feel the tugs of the wind on the caravan (trailer). Fearing that our caravan might topple over, I sought the first exit down to the lower road, where we were sheltered completely from the wind by the range of inland mountains.

Congratulating myself on my genius in avoiding the scirocco, I drove along this sheltered coastal road. My joy was short-lived. After a while, we came to a gorge – a rift in the mountains – forged by a river flowing to the sea, over which there was a long bridge. On the bridge, we would be fully exposed to the wind which came whistling through, funneled more forcefully through the narrow gorge. We had barely gone a few yards on the bridge when the steering wheel came alive in my hands and the caravan started bucking wildly.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, I saw the caravan actually becoming air-borne, while simultaneously hearing it landing on its side with a crash! The car listed to one side with its rear-end lifted up in the air, caught up in the grotesque embrace of the overturned caravan. We jumped out in panic.

Although the caravan lay on its side, it was luckily still on the bridge, held in place by the latter’s low retaining wall. Although the children had managed to scramble out of the car, they were in danger of being blown off the bridge into the gorge! I got them to crawl off the bridge in the shelter of its low parapet wall. But as soon as they crawled off the latter’s shadow, Anjali, my small daughter of 11 years, was sent staggering, almost airborne, by the wind – so that I had to make a flying rugby tackle to bring her down!

Meanwhile, our upturned caravan and car were in the middle of the bridge, bringing all traffic on this main road to a halt, with traffic piling up at both ends. At this juncture, fortune smiled upon us. Just behind us happened to be a military convoy with many big trucks and equipment, headed by a jeep carrying four high-ranking officers. Since our caravan was now blocking the entire bridge, the military set to work. The caravan still rested on its side, held precariously by the low retaining wall of the bridge, from tipping into the gorge.

In the meantime, the soldiers righted the caravan, so that it stood on its own wheels. But only for a moment: for it was immediately struck down by the wind! So they put it upright again – to be immediately smashed down again. This happened repeatedly! Then I got a bright idea: with the massive army trucks lined up on the windward side of the bridge, we gingerly drove off the bridge to the sheltering shadow of a nearby mountain.

We were told to work our way to the next village two miles away, but were warned by the military officers not to move from there for another three to five days – the normal duration of a scirocco! Since we were really scared, we humbly accepted their instructions and limped our way with difficulty to the nearby village. By this time it was getting dark. So with great trepidation, we found a vacant lot in the shadow of a tall unfinished building, which we hoped would shelter us from the wind.

It was at this time that we noticed that we were not alone: for behind a bush was a swarthy man with a woollen cap, peering at us through the shrubbery. For the first time, I began to wonder whether ‘the natives’ were indeed friendly, or whether we really had reason to be afraid in ‘darkest’ Sicily! After some hide-and-seek, he came forward and told me that they had heard in the village that we had suffered an accident on the bridge. He said that he had come to check whether this was true, and whether he could be of any help. He then beckoned with his finger for me to follow him. He led me to a sort of shed in which other swarthy, unshaven men in woollen caps were sitting around, drinking wine. They all stopped to stare at this coloured stranger in seemingly sinister fashion! Really scared by this time, I excused myself and hastily retreated to our caravan, making sure to bolt the door and windows!

Next morning, with the sun shining brightly and a good breakfast under our belts, our predicament looked less dire. The only problem was that the scirocco was blowing unabated and we had to find a means of repairing our caravan, which was very badly damaged. We were discussing the possibilities when our ‘friend’ of the previous night, whose name was ‘Mario’, arrived along with a younger, better dressed man. We discovered later that most of the villagers had no more than a Grade 3 education: they were either unemployed, or were part-time workers on the railway lines, with rather profitless farming as a sideline.

My interlocutors now insisted that I follow them to another house. Although invited for a chat, I soon found that I was at an ‘interrogation’, with many others present. Led by the better dressed young man, they asked where we lived, where we came from, and where and how I was employed. I tried explaining to them that we were from Sri Lanka: but they had never heard of such a country! All went seemingly well until the better-dressed young man, the chief inquisitor (I later found that he was the only one who had advanced to Grade 5) asked me where I was employed.

To make it simple, I told him that I worked for the United Nations in Rome. ‘Ah- ha’ exclaimed the young man in triumph, turning to his audience: ‘How could he work for the United Nations in Rome when the United Nations is in New York?’ The villagers were impressed by their wise man! Pleadingly, I explained that I worked for the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which was part of the United Nations, but which was actually located in Rome.

But to no avail, because their educated young man had unmasked an impostor! None of my explanations did any good, since their ‘prosecutor’ was grandstanding for his audience! We obviously had ulterior motives in coming to their village. We must be zingari (gypsies), the only dark-skinned people they knew, who also moved around in caravans (roulottes) in order to steal. Besides, they all knew that there was no place called Sri Lanka, and they all knew that the United Nations was not in Rome but in New York! Only Il Papa (the Pope) lived in Rome! So why on earth would we come to their village – if not to steal their chickens?

The rest of the day was spent in trying to get emergency repairs to the gancio, the metal device that linked the car to the caravan. We found that the repairs needed three days. When we returned that evening to our damaged caravan, we found that our little daughter, Anjali, had done much to restore our status. A number of children had come to the land below our caravan to see the strangers, and one of them had recognized that we were speaking English. So the shout went up in the village: ‘they are speaking English; they are speaking English!’ By the next day, Anjali added further to our brownie points. Seated on her perch on the retaining wall, she commanded a group of about ten children in their English lessons, repeating after her: ‘c-a-t: cat; m-a-t: mat’, etc.

After three days of sitting out the scirocco and repairing the gancio, we prepared to set out as soon as the wind died down. On our last day, our friend Mario invited us to lunch at his home. This was a great social break-through – since it seemed to show that at least one person in the village trusted us. It was a poor house, barely furnished, with a show of mildewed ‘lace’ (plastic) curtains in the window.

We learned more about the hard life of these poor people, largely uneducated and unemployed, with only part-time casual work on the railway lines. He also told us that the villagers feared that we were zingari (gypsies) who had really come to their village to steal their chickens, but that he really did not believe this. He insisted on coming to see us off the next morning and was almost tearful when we parted. In parting, however, he begged me to please answer one last question. Pleadingly he asked me: ‘Tell me truly, why didn’t you try to steal our chickens?’

Looking back on this delightful but disastrous trip, I was amused that whereas our Sri Lankans friends had been fearful of the Sicilians, the poor Sicilians (at least in this poor village) were more fearful of us Sri Lankans: fearful that we would steal their chickens!