by Richard Stern

Three years ago, my wife and I spent about five weeks in Hyderabad (Andra Pradesh) lecturing on English and American literature to the well-trained students of Osmania University. After ten days of some discomfort at the lodge adjacent to the excellent American Studies Library, we lived in a good hotel and commuted by taxi or by the chauffeur-driven car of the head of the department. How much of the town we saw is hard to know, but we did go around a good deal and saw, heard, and smelled enough to fill our minds for quite a while. Among the thousands of things we didn't see or till "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" report a couple of nights ago know anything about was the existence there of 17 transition home-schools for 5,000 young girls brutalized into the world of childhood prostitution. These schools, called "eternal flames" or Prajwala were founded and are run by a heroic and brilliant 34-year-old woman, Dr. Sunitha Krishnan, who herself had been raped at 15 and beaten many times before and since. By chance, I'd just read a story of Hemingway's called "The Denunciation" which celebrates in his inimitable way a very different sort of heroism and gallantry. Its center is the wonderful Madrid bar Chicote which for years served martinis made with the finest yellow gin and whose waiters were famously cheerful, friendly, and helpful. The time is 1938 and to the astonishment of the narrator, into the bar walks one of its former patrons now a flyer for Franco. The narrator recalls what a wonderful pigeon shot the man was and the day that despite his own poor shooting, he won every peseta the man had. The man was a wonderful sport. That he should now come into this bar where waiters have lost sons to the Franco forces amazes him. A waiter tells the narrator he wishes to denounce the man to the Seguridad. The narrator gives him the number of a friend there, and when he leaves the bar, the agents are already driving up to effect the capture. He asks himself why the old pigeon shooter returned to Chicote's and decides that he just couldn't imagine coming to Madrid without coming to this best of all bars. The narrator calls his friend at Seguridad and asks him to tell the man that he the narrator denounced him. He does not want him to go to his death thinking poorly of Chicote's waiters. Hemingway notions of gallantry and heroism have not entirely disappeared. The sexual hierarchy which was an unspoken ingredient of it still exists. The savaged, tyrannized eight- and ten-year-old girls in the Prajwala schools can be seen as its ugliest extrapolation. I myself know several brilliant and charming septuagenarians whose vitality can only be sustained or renewed by women 40 and 50 years their junior. For almost 40 years, I myself have lived happily with a woman more than 20 years younger than I am. I am not going to pin a medal on my chest nor do more than joke with my friends about their latest conquest, but I am delighted that more and more thinking and caring people realize the authentic gallantry, heroism, and grandeur of such people as Dr. Sunitha Krishnan.