One of My Lifetime Best Stories

CHAPTER ONE

I entered the office of Air France in New Delhi in the last week of November 1965 and asked to meet the boss, Robert Rieffel. I had been tipped off within days of arriving in India that the boss had my same last name and decided to find out if there was a family connection. He wasn’t in but I was given his home address.

“Bonjour. Je m’appelle Alexis Rieffel” I announced two weeks later when he opened his front door. He responded politely enough but with little apparent interest. I explained the unusual connection to my family name. It came from my French great-grandmother and not my great-grandfather because they weren’t married. My grandfather, born in Paris in 1859, was a “love child”. Being French, Robert Rieffel found unremarkable the love child part of my French connection. We were unable to find any genealogical connection.

Somehow during the conversation, Robert Rieffel mentioned that he had been the head of the Air France office in Rio de Janeiro before being assigned to New Delhi. So, I asked him if by any chance he knew my aunt, Mireille Gale. That lit him up. My vivacious aunt had been a pillar of the French community in Rio, and it turned out that she was like a sister to Robert Rieffel. Suddenly I was transformed from being just another curious American kid to being a long-lost cousin.

I need to explain why I was in New Delhi in 1965. In short, I had joined the US Peace Corps, and they assigned me to a project in India to promote modern poultry keeping. My site was in Ghaziabad, an industrial suburb of New Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

CHAPTER TWO

A whole year later, in November 1966, I was invited to lunch by Robert Rieffel. It wasn’t just to be nice to me. He was looking for my help. One of his Air France colleagues was married to Charlotte Perriand. Charlotte was a collaborator of the well-known French architect Le Corbusier. She did much of the interior design work for his buildings: furniture and much more. One of the greatest of their collaborations was the new capital of the state of Punjab in India: Chandigarh.

Charlotte and her husband had one child, a daughter, Pernette, who was finishing her university studies. Pernette had decided the time had come to check out her mother’s work at Chandigarh. She naturally turned to her father for help in arranging a visit and her father naturally appealed to his good friend Robert Rieffel to make sure his daughter would be well received in India. Robert Rieffel in turn decided that Lex Rieffel would be suitable as a guide to take Pernette to Chandigarh because he spoke French well, was conversant in Hindi, and knew his way around India. But especially because I was the nephew of his dear friend Mireille Gale.

Incidentally, while I was a student at Princeton University (1959-1963), I developed an interest in architecture, in part because the Architecture Department was located in a building next to my freshman dormitory and I often stopped by to look at the student projects on display in the large lobby. This led to an interest in Le Corbusier to such a degree that I made the pilgrimage to his “Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut” at Ronchamp in the province of Alsace at the beginning of a summer-long bicycle tour of France in 1961.

Chapelle Notre-Dame-du-Haut

Pernette arrived at the New Delhi airport on 25 November 1966. My expectation of finding myself in the presence of a gorgeous French girl—I should say woman—was not disappointed by the reality. Sadly, I have very few memories of the visit to Chandigarh. I do remember, however, that we got the Red-Carpet Treatment during the one full day we spent there. As I reviewed my journal entries for that month, I was also reminded that I had taken Pernette to Ghaziabad and to interesting places in New Delhi like the Red Fort. I even found this entry, underlined: “I was in love”. Pernette flew back to Paris on December 4. I deeply regret that I am unable to illustrate this chapter with a photo of Pernette and me in front of one of Le Corbusier’s buildings. Maybe she has one . . .

CHAPTER THREE

I joined the Peace Corps to establish some credibility in the field of economic development, the field in which I planned to make my career. To its credit, at my request, the agency placed me in a group being trained to go to India. At the end of my 2-year commitment, in June 1967, I made a life-changing decision. I would not tie my career to India because India would probably split chaotically into several countries due to its extreme regional differences and its overpopulation. (I told my grad students in the 1990s that this was the worst call I ever made as an economist.) So, I decided to explore in East Asia to find another country where I might find work as a development economist with the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, or a comparable outfit.

Luckily, one of my Peace Corps groupmates, Don Bierlich, had similar plans to explore East Asia and he agreed to join me. Our first stop was Burma, which that year was limiting tourist visits to 24 hours. From there we went to Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The plan was to spend one week in Indonesia, but we ended up staying for five weeks, four of them on Bali.

The reason for the long stay in Bali was an extraordinary cremation ceremony in the town of Ubud, which was widely viewed as being the cultural center of Bali. Two of the major “princes” in the Ubud region had died within a few years of each other. Following the traditional practice, their bodies were embalmed and set aside for cremation on a date to be set by astrologers. These wise men decided that both princes should be cremated on the same day, 1 August 1967.

A single cremation for a member of the royalty is always an extravagant affair. This double cremation was over-the-top. Preparations began a year before the cremation day and involved a dozen villages in the vicinity of Ubud. The centerpiece of the event was a bamboo tower 12 meters high constructed on a bamboo framework, with the bodies of the deceased princes at the top of the structure. On the day of the cremation, more than 100 men lifted the framework and tower onto their shoulders and carried it about 200 meters from the palace in Ubud to the cremation ground. Upon arrival there, the bodies were lowered from the tower and placed inside two elaborately carved and decorated bull images that also had been carried to the cremation ground on the shoulders of teams of men. Then torches were directed at the tower and the bulls, and everything went up in flames.

I had not forgotten about Pernette and her ability to fly anywhere in the world on Air France, space available. Ten days before the cremation, I sent her a telegram inviting her to join us for this amazing celebration. Three days later she arrived. Just like that. Without the internet! Here are a couple of photos of Don and Pernette and me:

Incredibly, Don and I stayed until a few days before Cremation Day in the palace compound of the living Prince of Ubud, Tjokorde Gde Agung Sukawati (successor to one of the embalmed princes). This was possible because, when we were wandering around Bali’s capital city of Denpasar looking for a place to stay, Don Bierlich’s nose (I give him all the credit) led us to the faculty housing complex of Universitas Udayana and directly to the house of Religion Professor Ida Bagus Oka. Professor Oka invited us to crash on the floor of his house and a day or two later we made the acquaintance of his next-door neighbor, English professor Gedong Bagus Oka. (A few years later, she became the longtime representative of the Hindu religion in Indonesia’s parliament.)

These two new acquaintances arranged for us to stay in the Palace complex in Ubud, which was no casual affair. Tjokorde Gde Agung Sukawati thrived as a host of foreign visitors. He held court most evenings around a dinner table that produced some of the finest conversations that I have witnessed in my lifetime along with wonderful stories of Bali’s history, culture, and myths.

Tjokorde Gde Agung Sukawati, from a Google search, much as I remember him

I took lots of photos of the cremation preparations and the cremation ceremony itself with the Nikkomat single-lens reflex camera I had purchased in Hong Kong when I was doing my Navy service in Saigon in 1963-64. The film was developed into 35mm slides and I digitized them ten years ago on a CD-ROM. But now I don’t have a computer that takes CD-ROM disks.

Many years ago, I enlarged and printed my best slide of the cremation process. Here is one of the bulls on the way to the cremation ground, with the tower behind it on the shoulders of as many as 100 men:

For several days after the cremation, Pernette and I stayed in one of the pavilions at the Kuta Beach Hotel. My love was unrequited. Pernette announced that she had recently emerged from an abusive relationship and wanted nothing to do with men. We had plenty of fun swimming and body surfing in the Indian Ocean.

CHAPTER FOUR

I have been in France often since the amazing summer of 1967, especially since 2013 when the last member in the only French branch of my relatives died. She had made me the executor of her will and there were many complications. (My experience is settling two estates in France was described in my July 2 post.)

Around 2017 I decided to try to reconnect with Pernette. I got as far as establishing that she was married and living at an address on the Left Bank of Paris. I learned that her husband was associated with an art institute. I went there and left a message for him to pass to Pernette with my contact information, but I got no response from her.

Wrapping up this story, on my visit to France in 2019 I noticed that there was an exhibition of the lifetime work of Charlotte Perriand at the Louis Vuitton Museum. I went there with the above photos of Pernette, hoping to connect with her. At the information desk, I was told that Pernette had been so deeply involved in her mother’s exhibition that she had an office in the museum, although she had not shown up on this particular day. I left a nice message for her with my contact information. I’m still waiting for a response. Maybe she didn’t get it.

It’s a sad ending to a Lifetime Best Story.