You may ask, But what of Legson, pray? Well, to recap, I take you to my final class days of 1959 at Turnbull High School in Darjeeling. I’m 16, and the school’s senior classes are having “coaching” sessions from teachers for the final exams before the long winter hibernation begins in the hills. It’s an annual pre-exam schedule at the school. My class is having revision of our history lessons, and Ravi Khati Sir is the subject teacher for Class IX, our group.One day, having covered his course, he produced the month’s Reader’s Digest and said, “Listen boys, here is a story of an African boy’s determination. He walked thousands of miles to the end of Africa to go to America for his further education. For full details, here’s the story. I’ll read it, you listen.”
Then he read the story in English, explained in Nepali those portions of geography and other new facts and figures we didn’t know. That’s how the name “Legson Kahira” remained with me, and that’s how and why I write this positive picaresque parable after 50 years, when I myself have entered my 67th year.
There were schoolteachers at Turnbull then who managed their classes in this way. When we were done with the academic year’s syllabus and tutorials, the teachers undertook “extracurricular” activities – football matches with other schools, NCC parades and smart turnouts, PT workouts, Boy Scouts, nature excursions, and the like. Inside the classes, extra reading from external sources were an annual staple: Indra Bahadur Rai reading Nepali short stories well before they were published in “Diyalo” which he edited; or Amber Gurung’s concerts with seniors (Sharan Pradhan, Ranjit Gazmer et al) who were musicians. It was active and non-formal education with entertainment and constructive participation, while proving that Board curricula alone were not enough in learning.
Khati Sir of Judge Bazaar soon left Turnbull High. He was accepted by AIR (All India Radio) in Delhi for its Nepali Department’s broadcasting network. We heard his voice as newsreader in Nepali. But, above all, he left the name of Legson “Kahira” with us, and that’s how I, for one, have come to write this column today, after all these years!
Google will tell readers all about Legson Kayira. Some fragments of what we learnt about his life and walk from Ravi Sir’s reading from his copy of RD that pre-winter afternoon in 1959 remain with me to this day: That Legson left his village in Malawi sometime in 1958, telling his village that he was walking to America for more education. While no one knew where America was, Legson – a name he had given himself – left in his school uniform. He had no shoes, no money, but he carried a small ax, a bag of flour for food for five days, a blanket, a map of Africa, a world map, and two books – an English Bible and a copy of John Bunyan’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” He planned to walk north to Addis Ababa, or Port Said, or Alexandria in Egypt where he would find work on a ship headed for New York.
In three days Kayira crossed the border and trekked through Tanganyika. He spent seasons and climates and passed through jungles, meeting villagers along the way. He walked on roads, trails and railroad tracks from one point to another, working his way up north. Then he reached Mwanza on Lake Victoria, worked for a steamer ticket to Kampala in Uganda. He had covered some 1,000 miles by then. Working and earning in Kampala, he saw the United States Information Service (USIS) and its free library in the city. There, Kayira discovered a directory of American junior colleges. The first one he picked was Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington, near Seattle. He wrote to them and he received a reply, offering him a full scholarship and finding a job. He finally got a Nyasaland (previous name for Malawi) passport and a visa to enter Sudan.
It was then Kayira bought his first pair of shoes and trekked again, hitched rides in cars and on bicycles. Reaching Juba in Sudan, he took a steamer to Khartoum. But in Khartoum, he was informed that to get a foreign student visa, he had to have either money or a sponsor and return passage. However, the US embassy was so impressed with Kayira that its vice-Consul himself contacted Skagit Valley College whose students and the community of Mount Vernon raised enough money to have him in Washington State. A Mount Vernon family offered him a home. In December 1960, in a formal suit provided by embassy personnel, Kayira boarded a flight for New York, and arrived in America as a “celebrity.”
This is the sum of the parts I remember having heard from Ravi Khati Sir’s recitation of Legson Didimu Kayira’s long passage to north Africa and beyond from the Reader’s Digest copy he held in his hands that day. The rest of Legson’s sagas, right upto the present times, can be downloaded from Internet sources.
Legson had named himself thus because it perhaps foreordained his footwork – that he would purposely slog half the continent of Africa one day: quite similar to the dramatic undertaking of Afrikaners on their Boer treks in South Africa.
This fact impressed me because I also trudged up and down, each day seven miles (kilometers wasn’t known then) one way, to and fro the valley school at Bijanbari and my family’s farmhouse in a village called Nor Busti, opposite the hill range of Darjeelingtown. This daily up-and-down 14-mile trek for some 10 months of the year continued for three years, from 1953 to 1956, until our mother took my younger brother and me to Darjeeling for further schooling. My brother Mark, being 14 months younger than me, did an equal job with me in crossing the many creeks, gulches and streams, negotiating the landslide-prone steep bends, traversing the narrow hilly trails like mountain goats. We trekked through three diverse rain-and-shine seasons, and carried on every morning and evening, six days a week, and spent our severe and windy winter vacation on the farm. The second similarity is that both Legson and I were farm boys; and thirdly, our initial education started in Scottish Mission schools run by the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. These commonalities made me remember Legson Kahira/Kayira for these many decades.
There are yet other similarities between the two of us: We’re both writers now. Of course, I can’t match his NYTimes bestsellerdom and the reputation of his other major literary works. But then, we were also both teachers at one time. And his footloose campaign also perhaps translated into my own wanderlust and quest for knowledge. And lastly, both of us now live far away from our native lands and birthplaces.
However, in our lifelong treks, travels and travails, Legson and I aren’t quite alone. He surely did inspire those African gold-medal runners and marathoners at the Olympics, while the Himalayan foothills have its own age-old footers – the trans-Himalayan Newar traders between Kathmandu, Kalimpong, Calcutta and Lhasa; the snow-leopard Sherpas of the hills and Himals; the intrepid and seven-seafaring Gurkhas/Gorkhas; the Manangay mercantile itinerants; the salt sack-laden goat caravan drivers of west Nepal between India and Tibet; and so forth and so on. Wants, wishes and lures have long made many Nepalis outbound for centuries. Thus were born the many Muglan-s.
Dr. Harka Gurung left his northern village in Lamjung before 12, and reached Kathmandu after a trek of nearly two weeks. Years later, he left for Edinburgh University for his PhD in geography. Thereafter, he traversed the length and breadth of Nepal as a geographer, demographer, culturist, anthropologist with western experts, artist, and photographer, and as the government’s policymaker and planner.
Capt. Ram Bahadur Limbu, VC (Victoria Cross), didn’t leave his remote village of Chyangthapu on a palanquin, much less in a car; he walked up and down the eastern Nepali hills to reach Sikkim and Darjeeling before he boarded a ship for Malaya and won his VC in the mangroves of Borneo. Tamla Ukyab hurtled virtually vertically down from his native Olangchung Gola along the Kanchanjunga Ridge to Bijanbari (the same valley bazaar I mentioned above), then to climb up the Singtam and Chong Tong tea estates to reach his college at North Point in Darjeeling. When John Kenneth Galbraith visited the college and knew about Tamla’s annual ascents and descents on foot, the departing US ambassador to India swallowed hard to believe it. But frontiersmanship has always been there in the Himalaya.
Around this time in my life, in 1963, there appeared another kind of Legson Kayira in Darjeeling. His name was Henry Lessore, and he came from Champion Grove in London. This Brit sailed around the world, earning passage, food and board as a deckhand. He had landed in Bombay to travel in India. I found him playing my guitar at an all-Nepali music meet at the Capitol Hall in town. He sang English and American folksongs, and remained in town for a week. I guided him around before he left for Calcutta for a hop on a ship for Singapore. He traveled light: a small bag for his change of clothes, a diary, and an inkpot for his pen. Henry was a better edition of the Hippies who would soon hit the hashish highways of the world from Haight-Ashbury to Mozambique, Portugal, and Kathmandu to Goa.
Then there was an American Legson Kayira in the late 1980s. Dr. Mel Carey – a Stanford graduate with a PhD in music from the University of Chicago – was my fellow teacher at a university in Bangkok.
Before he landed in Thailand, his American passport had taken him to seven diverse countries. He visited Nepal; then he left for Japan, and then Taiwan, and Britain. He taught English, blew French horn with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra, played piano at Shangri-La in Kathmandu, hit the piano bars of Tokyo and Kaohsiung, and promoted the “Packet” pool game he had developed. The last I heard from this inveterate wanderer was from Istanbul. Nearly 80 now, he must be back in his county near San Francisco.
Well, in conclusion, before turning hopelessly previous, I retrace the threads of my essay: How the story of a young African’s hunger for knowledge and wisdom tugged him away from his village to a distant continent of advanced learning, and how the tale on the very protagonist read by a schoolteacher to a 16-year-old 9th grader like me in 1959, and that too in distant Darjeeling, prompted this yarn to be written in the last days of 2009.
The message, then, is clear: Quo vadis – in 2010? Whither goest thou? Where do we want to go? Where are we going?
Peter J Karthak is the author of ‘Every Place, Every Person: A Himalayan Table form Darjeling’ (2004).
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