My visit to the place where my great, great uncle Jacob Andrew Ressler went as the first Mennonite Church missionary a century earlier was about to commence as the plane began its descent from 30,000 feet.
The plane landed in Delhi from Chicago in 14 hours without incident. I made it through customs and hired a prepaid taxi to take me to New Friends Colony, an upscale part of Delhi, to spend the night. After arriving at the house and chatting some, I laid down on a bed that was clean albeit slightly harder than my bed at home. I wondered how Uncle JA felt on that first night.
Morning came quickly. The missionaries who gave me a place to sleep for the night had responsibilities for the day so I was on my own. I decided to spend the half day I had by visiting Old Delhi. Even though Uncle JA had arrived in the city of Bombay not Delhi, Old Delhi is a part of town that would get me as close to what Uncle JA would have seen as any place.
My plan was to take a rickshaw to the subway. I thought the contrast would be striking, old rickshaws and a modern subway system experienced one after the other. It was easy enough to find a bicycle powered rickshaw, they were everywhere. The problem was that the driver did not know English and I did not know Hindi. I never made it to the subway. The rickshaw driver took me instead to a taxi station where I hired an auto rickshaw to take me to Old Delhi. Uncle JA must have made many such adjustments.
Parts of Old Delhi are likely the same as 100 years ago with the narrow streets, shops, and endless flow of people intermingled with animals and human drawn carts. The houses and shops have certainly been there that long. But there are things that were certainly not there at the turn of the 20th century. Chief among them are the cell phones. Nearly everyone seems to have one. I was also impressed with the taxis and buses. Interestingly, all of them are powered by propane to keep the pollution down.
I made it back to the missionary house, sent of an email to my family and headed to the airport where I was about to fly on Kingfisher Airlines, an ultra-modern airline, to Raipur. The one hour and twenty minute 700 mile flight from Delhi to Raipur with a personal TV and a nice snack had almost nothing in common with the 700 miles Uncle JA faced in his trip from Bombay to Raipur. Travel was a major problem in his day. Uncle JA he tells a story in his book about walking 183 miles in four days on one occasion to take his friend, Dr. Page, who was seriously ill with malaria to a city for help. Even the ox drawn carts were abandoned at one point and Dr. Page was carried on a cot by 8 Indian men who jogged more than 20 miles to get him help because the ride was too rough. The greatest challenge I had was not bumping my head on the overhead compartments when I stood up from my seat as I deplaned.
We began our descent to the city of Raipur. Who will be there and how will we know each other, I wondered.
