If you want to talk to our correspondent in Batavia, Java, his telephone number is (or was, recently) satuh duaw sambulan toojoo. Ask for Robert Sherrod--but don't expect him to be there.

During the last six months Sherrod has traveled 25,000 miles trying to keep up with the news in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific. The Pacific--from Attu to Iwo Jima --was his stamping ground in World War II, and we sent him back there after the war on a roving commission to go anywhere his news judgment dictated. His work to date is fairly typical of the postwar trials, tribulations and rewards of a TIME correspondent.

He chose Java, and the Indonesian independence movement, for his first major assignment and, in the process of reporting that story, made two trips through territory forbidden to white men with Sjahrir, Indonesian premier. He also spent some time with rebel leader Soetomo, a fiery five-footer regarded by the Dutch as a most dangerous enemy. Soetomo's chief lieutenant was a pint-sized woman, about 50 years old, who said she was born on the Isle of Man, claimed U.S. citizenship through one of her marriages, and was variously known as Miss Tantri, Miss Daventry, Miss Merdeka (freedom), and Surabaya Sue (for her "freedom" broadcasts over the secret Indonesian radio).

In the process of meeting and sizing up most of the newsworthy people in his territory, Sherrod interviewed Mahatma Gandhi, who told him with a twinkle in his eye: "I had assumed that Americans were to be the new citizens of the world, but I find them all homesick lads." Gandhi's opponent, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, leader of the Moslems, was not so easy to get to. In fact, he wanted a year's subscription to TIME as the price of an interview.

Like almost everything else in the postwar Far East, transportation--like communications, a correspondent's lifeline--is a shambles. Says Sherrod: "Covering a war was fairly simple, provided, of course, you lived through it. There were public relations officers to make your reservations, and nobody worried about priorities because the admirals and generals wanted their war covered. Nowadays, it is every man for himself, and it is a fight from beginning to end."

For instance, Sherrod tried for three days to buy a plane ticket for a quick trip from New Delhi, India, to Shanghai (via Calcutta and Manila). When he finally located the Air Transport Command officer and gave him money for the passage, the ATCman promptly lost it. So Sherrod bought another ticket and got to the airport just in time to watch his plane taking off (they had given him the wrong departure time). In Calcutta, nobody had even heard of his reservation for Manila. There, he found that his China visa had not arrived and, to make things more difficult, a brand new inoculation for plague had been ordered. That meant a seven-day wait. Meanwhile, the ATCman in New Delhi had found the original passage money he claimed Sherrod had not given him . . . etc. Eventually, Sherrod got to China.

Sherrod's recipe for riding out such exasperating delays and frustrations is: a degree of patience, a sense of humor, adaptability to changing conditions and an iron stomach. "Furthermore," he says, speaking of his stomach as well as the scores of tongues the Far East talks in, "thank God for the English language and Chinese restaurants. They are familiar everywhere. And most of the people in Asia who know English know TIME."

One of them is the leading dentist of New Delhi, whose air-conditioned, neon-lighted office is a repository for TIME, LIFE, FORTUNE and THE ARCHITECTURAL FORUM--all of which arrive there ahead of the TIME India office's own airmailed copies. Sherrod, and others who tried unsuccessfully to solve this mystery, are inclined to lay it to 1) a special "in" with the customs officials, 2) the inscrutable East.

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