A day or so later an official-looking letter arrived asking me to turn up at the police station in a little town eighty miles from Delhi—let’s call it Mustafabad—and ask for the chief of police. Feeling like a character in a Sherlock Holmes story about India during the Raj, I made my way to Mustafabad and presented myself at the station, where the clerk on duty told me that the chief was at his home just then; so I walked to his little villa at the edge of town. A servant brought lunch to us at a table on the lawn.
My host and I chatted in a leisurely way about our two countries, my travels, this war. Finally he opened a folder and produced my passport and documents, as well as the seven crisp one-hundred-dollar bills. Someone had turned the pouch in with the contents intact, the policeman said matter-of-factly. He would just ask me to verify my identity, and then to write out the serial numbers of the bills and sign a document attesting that the money had been returned to me. I was seven-thousand miles from home, and until this moment I had nothing to prove who I was. You could have knocked me over with a feather.
The chief of police’s name made me almost certain that he was a Muslim, and after I had tucked my pouch away and we were finishing off our meal with fruit compote and tea, I asked him about being a Muslim in a majority Hindu country. First he acted surprised that I knew enough to tell a Muslim name from a Hindu name, which only shows how little foreigners are reckoned to know in this part of the world. He talked about having to be very circumspect. He never suggested that he might have given witness to something exemplary about his religion by returning my money.
If he had said that the hundred-dollar bills were missing when the pouch was brought to the station, there would have been no way to disprove it. I thanked this honest man for the lunch and for the kindness he had showed to a stranger. Even today, when Islam is mentioned, I remember the police chief of Mustafabad.
Richard Tillinghast is the author of twelve books of poetry and four of creative nonfiction. His Selected Poems came out in 2010, and he was awarded a 2010 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry. His latest non-fiction book is An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul, 2012. Richard lived in Ireland for five years and moved back to this country in 2011; he currently divides his time between Tennessee and the Big Island of Hawaii.