Anyways, back to the albums. Knowing of my passion for the country, they saved for me the one with the photos of India. It is an old album of 20 by 30 cm of brown cardboard with one big black and white photo on each page. They are mostly landscapes and people going on in their routines (no selfies then) except for one, of my grandpa on an elephant. He was 52 at the time.

But also, they found his travel diary. My grandfather had very precious calligraphy, very 19the century, with all the letters perfectly delineated but this is the funny thing: he wrote it on an agenda of 1954 where each page covers two days, so to be able to write all the events of the day in half a page he wrote with really diminutive letters which makes the reading very, very hard.  So, there was no much place for thoughts and reflections, just the details of places visited and the things done.

He spent twelve days in India, from January 22nd to February 4th 1954 (later in the 60’s he would go back with my grandmother) and during those days he visited Delhi, Mathura, Agra, Fatehpur, Jaipur, Varanasi, Calcutta, and Darjeeling. Obviously, at some point, he fell ill and had to stay in his room.

At Delhi, he stayed at the Imperial Hotel, where the first thing he did was unpack his suits. Not one, but several. Nowadays is funny to think that people used to dress up for travelling, not down. I’ve seen photos of him with impeccable grey trousers, blue blazer and of course a tie, in the Honduran jungle or at the Austrian Alps and my grandmother with a smart suit or dress and an elegant handbag.

He was a pipe smoker (I’ve gotten one of his pipes), he was quite grouchy, he read the newspaper from first to last page every day, he was a devoted family man, he enjoyed receiving friends, and basically, he loved to travel

First thing in the morning he had a haircut at his room (he was fussy about his appearance) and after going through some formalities at the embassy of Thailand for his next step, he met with his two companions just arrived from the airport. After lunch, they made a promenade through the residential area of Delhi with he compared to the Alvear avenue of Buenos Aires, one of the most elegant of the city. Thereafter followed an incredibly full program of visits: to the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid mosque, the Humayun Tomb, the Qutub Minar, the Parliament, the presidential residence and the Raj Ghat.

The next days were all as full: Mathura (“super interesting for its squalor, colour and Asian picturesque”), Agra and the Taj Mahal (“marvelous, magnificent”), in Jaipur he went to the stadium for a dance show  performed by companies from all over India, part of the celebrations of the Republic Day, to which the then president assisted,  which he loved.