Resumo de All The Way To Heaven

An Autobiography, of a person living continents apart, reads like your own- how incongruous it sounds- yet any one can identify with the boy Stephen Alter in his autobiographical book All the Way to Heaven- An American boyhood in Himalayas. The book is not a personal history. It is comprehensive anthology of social-cultural-geographical history of the world of seventies. It was not Stephen?s parents but I who was ?aboard the frontier mail, hearing the cries of hawkers selling tea and sweets, swarms of flies, a rhesus monkey clinging to the bars on the train windows stealing peanuts...? Turning pages of the book, I see reflection of my own life mirrored in the memories of the author. Many of us would have in our attics the photographs? taken by my father with his Rollieflex camera, black and white snapshots in which the shutter opened for a fraction of a second... Most of my childhood photographs are preserved in an album with a heavy vinyl cover and the thick black pages. Between each page is transparent sheet of tissue paper to protect the pictures. Under the photographs in white pencil, my mother has written places and dates...these photographs are fragments from a period of my life which I cannot fully piece together even though the pictures have a surety about them that locates me in a specific time and place. Yet in a way the chronology of my early childhood has become distorted and imprecise, a movable montage of faces, scenes and incidents?.? Hardly anyone had a telephone in landour and most common form of communication was to send chitties or notes.... All our provisions and supplies were transported in trunks and boxes, baskets and bundles, loaded on to the backs of coolies. during the season there was a constant procession of wallahs, who went from door to door selling their wares. The first to arrive in the morning were bakers, who would open their tin trunks on the front verandah to display assortments of breads and cakes...Bhurey khan was the baker my mother bought things from. A portly man, he always wore a dark suit jacket over a pair of baggy pajamas...the milk was transported in metal containers carried on their backs ...the procession continued all morning...razai wallahs who came to fluff our mattresses and quilts. Over their shoulders they carried instruments that looked like giant harps with which they teased the cotton into feathery mounds. When they were fluffing quilts on the verandah it looked like snow, their strings twanging rhythmically?.That the author really loved the place where he was born is borne out the way he describes the place- Landour and people who inhabited it. ?The British had a way of distorting pronunciation as well as spellings of most Indians names, so that mansura or mansuri was eventually changed to Mussoorie, which sounds as though it might have been a Welsh hamlet or some castle in Scotland...the British came to the mountains in search of a familiar environment, the cold, the mist, the drizzle and rain. Dense forests of oak and pine nurtured their memories of home and cool climate provided a respite from the hot summer months on the plains?. ?In many ways Landour was like a small town in middle America-Winesburg, Ohio, transported to the first range of the Himalayas. On the surface it was quiet pious world of motherly white women who smiled at us...we knew our manners and returned their greetings, stepping aside to let them pass. A tribal loyalty existed on the hillside, a code of behavior and courtesy which was self-consciously American?.Sometimes the author describes some of these people with tongue in cheek humor with emphasis on the pun on names.? At that time the British surgeon was a man named T B Butcher and his assistant was named Nurse Blood?.Besides tickling our funny bones, Alter swings our moods from jovial to serious, alteration brought in by masterstroke of pen. Along the funny vein runs the arterial philosophy.? From every landmark on the hillside there were lessons to be learned...as a child I grew up with an unconscious sense of inevitability and fate. At the same time I was reminded of consequences of my actions. Growing up in Landour I sensed that everyone was being watched to make sure he or she did not stray from the straight and narrow... Once a week, Omprakash, the dhobi or washerman, would arrive at our house, carrying enormous bundle of laundry on his back. He reminded me of a character in John Bunyan?s moral tale, The Pilgrim?s Progress, who is forced to shoulder the burden of his sins?.If Mussoorie?s panoramic view was moralistic then Pennsylvania was God?s own country. The chapter titled Ithaca not only transports the reader aboard the plane onto the journey through Europe and America but also makes you feel that east or west being virtuous is the best. Though the American author is nostalgic about his birthplace, sitting in his motherland he does not for a minute suggest that one place is better than the other. All that he seems to be saying is, however modern or however the primitive place it be, morality counts and that when it comes to brotherhood, human values and communal harmony, we should remember that is all what is needed for peaceful co-existence of all that God, the Almighty created. Neelmani

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