Introduction

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer working as a Fisheries Technician in India from 1971 to 1973 and, as such, who wouldn’t have tales to tell.

My new home was at Bhagora Fish Farm in the State of Madhya Pradesh, near Shivpuri, in the middle of the North. Upon leaving service I had a collection experiences that I had recorded in notebooks, letters home, and photographs. But a much more vivid depository was in my head, and heart, because those two years were crammed full of adventure, new friendships, professional development, and a newfound love for India and its people.

Over the years the memories would nag at me— I just had to share them because they included a range of interesting, comical, bizarre, and heartfelt stuff. It was not difficult to begin stitching it all together with the aid of a laptop and a slide scanner. From the first, each story was meant to stand alone and I continued that format, more or less. For this collection, I combined them chronologically except that several are thematic. I used Dakota font for stories that are totally derived from my notebooks. I used this Papyrus font for my thematic stories, although in the story Shivpuri Nights I inserted notebook portions in Dakota font here and there and those are labeled Journal Entries.

I thank my friend Mary Ann Cincotta, who deserves special recognition for her work editing and providing helpful suggestions.

In sharing these tales, I strove towards accuracy, and thus degrees of vulgarity occasionally emerge. Some may chuckle, others may not. Likewise, my roles in them are presented “warts and all.” I hope my readers will tolerate the transliterated Hindi dialog that I used here and there with rough translations. It is a language that I learned and conversed in daily, and I became very fond of it.

It turned out to be a good time to be in India because I avoided a bad situation that would develop in 1975 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency and then ruled by decree, suspended elections, curbed civil liberties, prisoned political opponents, and censored the press.