Her beloved chicken is up for sale!
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When you feel lost, pause and look closely around you.
Somewhere, somehow, an angel will be waiting to guide you home.
~ Unknown
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I had longed to visit India and Nepal since at least the sixties. Now it was the eighties and I had my chance. I was finishing up in Somalia and, while on a visit to Kenya, I found a travel agent who could reroute me from returning to the US through Europe so would be able to travel the other way around the world. After three weeks in Nepal and a week in Varanasi, India, I was back at my home base of Delhi and the Claridges Hotel. It was a much more modest affair than what shows up on their website today. For example, it had one sort of dumpy restaurant then. Today it has five differently themed restaurants plus a bar, bakery, and deli. Its best features when I was there were air conditioning and a bookstore that had a small selection of novels in English. Since it was the hot season with triple digit temps, I often would lay on my bed and read.

The population of India at the time was about 800 million. (It has almost doubled since then.) So there was no lack of people wherever I went. Yet, at one point, I noticed that I felt very lonely and alone; that my interactions with people were mostly impersonal and superficial. I pined for connection with others in ways that really matter.

Before leaving Somalia, I had consulted with a dear friend who was from India. She gave me wonderful counsel. She also gave me the name and contact info for a woman in Delhi who she thought I would appreciate meeting. Despite that recommendation, I doubted I would follow through. But now I was at a point where I needed to take the risk. I knew nothing about the woman but I called her anyway, told her I was feeling homesick, and asked if I could pay her a visit.

The afternoon with her was a wonderful healing. Tara Ali Bagg’s two Lhasa Apsos showered me with attention and affection. Her son popped in to say hi. The main event, however, was the connection I felt with her. As a warm-up, she asked me to share some about my work in Somalia, why I went there, and what it meant to me. Then she shared her purpose of many years: She was deeply involved with SOS Children’s Villages India. This is from their website: “At SOS Children’s Villages India, we are committed to the welfare of parentless and abandoned children as well as working out ways to strengthen families and communities as a preventive measure in the fight against abandonment and social neglect.” I later learned from her biography on Wikipedia that she was first Asian woman President of the International Union for Child Welfare in Geneva.

Following that lovely and lively conversation came the blockbuster of that afternoon. She took out some photo albums to show me. The photos were of her children standing by Gandhi, holding hands with Nehru, and posed with others during the first days of Indian independence. She explained that her husband was the Chief of Protocol for that first independent government. 

The absolute jewel among those photos were the ones of Mother Teresa. They were luminous. There she was standing on the lawn with Mrs. Bagg’s children. There was so much light emanating from her physical being that it looked as though the camera was broken. Her halo was huge, with radiant rays, bright and complete. I couldn’t believe it! But there it was. What a blessing!

Some months later when I was back in the US, I was sitting the the lawn in front of the MN state capital for an outdoor performance of A Prairie Home Companion. I was with several friends of many years. One friend had developed a significant relationship with a man from India. As I was sharing my joyful and profound afternoon visit of kindnesses with a woman I had met in Delhi, he said, “That sounds like Tara Ali Bagg. She is a friend of my family. I’ve known her all my life and have met her many times.” It turns out that his father was headmaster at the most exclusive boys’ boarding school in India.

This phenomenon of interconnection between Indians I met actually continued to happen while I was in India. Yet, in that moment on the state capital lawn in the US, back on my home turf, it felt more like, even though the stats said the population of India was 800 million, my experience was that the population was more like 800 – or even 80 – and they all knew each other.

SOS villages in India today

Photo by Bsrbara
In a village along the road traveled
Rajasthan, India