689 words
New Delhi
28 May 1979
My dear Beryl,
What a lovely surprise to receive your letter — after all these years — and that wonderful picture book in German! I have a very good friend here — half French (from Normandy) half German — and a sister in faith, one who like myself sees in the European faith for which I live, and the essence of traditional Hindu metaphysical tenets and values (unlike myself she is a Sanskrit scholar), two parallel expressions of the One everlasting Hyperborean Faith: the faith of the Aryans. Only the Aryans who settled here some 6,000 years ago or more, had to express it in a mass of many races in the midst of which they were a minority keen on keeping itself pure, while there is (or was 50 years ago or so) a far greater racial unity in Germany (apart of one sort of aliens). This comrade has a good job (for the sake of which she has to keep her mouth shut), while I have no job at all for the last two years: they dismissed me from the French school on account of my age (I shall be full 74 on the 30th of September) and probably also on account of my poor eyesight. (I am half blind, with a cataract on one eye — the right one — that cannot be operated for it is not ripe.)
Mr. Mukherji passed away on the 21st of March 1977 — as poor as myself: He used to live on astrology, which is a crowded profession here in India, and left 40 rupees (= 10 DM) and the white cotton cloth he used to drape himself in: all his belongings! He would be 75 were he alive. I miss him for we were in perfect ideological agreement (and I can never forget the letter by which the Germany consul general in Calcutta recommended him to the authorities of his land in 1939 on his departure: “No man outside of Europe has rendered the Third German Reich services comparable to his,” signed: von Selzam).
Outwardly he looked like a European of the Mediterranean lands, brunet, but fair skinned and with perfect Aryan features. And he loved my cats. His last words were to tell me that my “Black Velvet” would come back the following day. He died that same day at 2:30 a.m. And the cat came back at night as I returned home from the cremation ground where my husband’s body was set in the funeral pyre (as the custom is here, and as it was among us before Christianity).
I have now five tom cats in this tiny room of mine (above a garage). I had another three females who all had kittens. I had to give them — and am paying toward their keep at the “Animals’ Friend,” an organization in North Delhi founded by Crystal Rogers and now managed by a German woman. I could not keep eight cats plus nine kittens in one room!! But I pine for my cats. These females were so caressing! But what to do? They are there in an open space, under trees, well looked after. And being with their kittens will get accustomed to it.
I have no pension from the French school being “locally recruited staff” — not sent from France. All I have is a small “national security” pension for the mere nine years I worked in France as a stopgap teacher: some 500 DM every three months. I manage for my own keep on a rupee — 25 pfennigs in German money a day. But the cats don’t. A mere tin of fish — with my swollen legs I cannot go to the market and get fresh fish, over and back in the burning sun — a can of fish cost 7½ rupees, practically 2 DM. And things are getting more and more expensive here as everywhere else. (My room rent: 260 rupees a month, i.e., 65 DM about.)
I mislaid J. Jones’ address. Now I get often muddled and don’t remember where I put things. Fortunately I sill remember history dates all right.
Am sending you a book of mine written 1968-71 in French. Am slowly writing another. There is nothing else I can do now.
Best love,
Savitri