A complex follow-up to my 6/27/23 posting “SUMC moments: the apple juice”, where I wrote:
At one point in my most recent SUMC stay we had gotten to the place where I was about to be taken off NPO (see my previous posting “SUMC moments: NPO”) and given some modest real food, but the orders to do this had not yet been issued. The head nurse (about whom more in another posting [this very posting], which will take us to India and the northeast corner of South America) took pity on me and extracted — oh great pleasure! — a tiny box of apple juice for me [from the wonderfully named apple juice company Apple & Eve].
Meanwhile I stared at Sha’s name tag, which said her name was:
Shakoentala Jagroep
I stared, baffled, by the name, with its puzzling OE spellings, until I recognized her first name in this strange spelling. Why, I asked, was Shakuntala — a name of great weight in India — spelled in this fashion? She was startled and impressed by my pronunciation, which I pronounced in Sanskrit fashion, notably with the T and L quite different from an English rendition of the name. “You said it right!”, she exclaimed. And added, cryptically, “The Dutch Empire”, but was then called away on other duties.
Later, I got to ask her what part of the Dutch Empire, guessing Indonesia, surely the biggest piece. But no: little Suriname, in the northeast corner of South America.
I will track through this history below, but first a digressive note about one of the evils of the Dutch in Indonesia.
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