NICK:
The story my father liked to tell me, later, much later, on the occasions when we communicated on November the 28th of any particular year, was that "When you were just a few hours old I held you in my arms and walked up and down the hall outside your hospital room, talking to you and telling you your name."
As far as I know Dad did this with all four of us kids, but what's important to me now, sixty-one years on, is that Dad was there in my earliest moments on Earth and he continued to be there throughout my life as an immovable stone pillar upon whom I could depend in good times and bad.
But on that day in the year 1957, all this was in the future.
I was born in a hospital called the Elgin Nursing Home at 6, Elgin Road in Calcutta, India, the third son of American parents.
My father, Russell Joseph Robinson, worked for Pan American World Airways as the coordinator for all things Pan American in East Asia: meeter and greeter of celebrities flying through Calcutta, director of all sales and ticketing for an eighth of the world's passenger traffic, and general barra-sahb (head honcho, top dog) for Pan Am operations.
Calcutta
In 1957 India had been independent from the British Raj for ten years. Calcutta, an industrial port city, had been the capital of the British Raj for about 180 years; once the location for Durbars and Viceroys and regional princes and ceremonies and processions, it was now just a grimy fading remnant of Empire, albeit one exploding with population and for us, the children of postwar America, a tropical childhood of pani trees, millions of tadpoles with the monsoon floods that beckoned each spring and chapatis toasting on charcoal fires in the servants' godowns.
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