Journeys (Part One)

I have been in a bit of a bad mood lately. It is lovely that so many of you like the blogs and tell me so but it also delivers an expectation. And, at the moment expectations are a little hard to live up to. Please bear with me then if the blog is not about what you, my dear reader, thinks it should be about. There will be days when I simply have to write myself out of depression and days when I can write about India, my mother and our shared childhood.

Holidays in India came in categories; leave, which involved travel to the UK and time spent with grandparents and in Wales: Puri, which involved a long journey and a fabulous two weeks by the sea: the mountains involved a plane journey and many hours being driven up winding roads to extraordinary beauty and see the 'India' family of the aunties.

My favourite, despite the long drive and perpetual car sickness, was always the mountains. My grandparents were never terribly complimentary about where we lived. They would tell us of TV reports of riots and Naxalites, of famine and drought and flood. We knew all of this but we also knew that life continued and was good. Yes, it was frightening to go to school and see the bodies of victims laid out on the Maidan. It was heartbreaking to see the Bangladesh refugees clinging to life at the side of the road.It was rather exciting when we thought the Chinese were going to sweep down and invade India. We were advised to leave so we did - for Puri. My mother said we could run away with the fishermen if the Chinese got too close but she thought the Indian Army was so good she wasn't really worried. These two approaches made for delicate times seeing my grandparents and I did love them dearly but I also loved home, and home was not where they were.

Puri was a cold weather holiday. On a glorious stretch of beach in Orissa sat a small town with a massive and very important temple at its centre. The Jaganath Temple is legendary largely because  of the festival where the Lord Jaganath is towed through the town in his chariot to visit his two wives at the Garden Temple at the other end of Puri. The temple was so holy that we were never allowed inside. It had a brooding presence over the bazaar with many holy men, sadhus, sitting at its edges giving the setting a certain maniac quality with their dreadlocks and ash marked faces.

It was and is an important place of pilgrimage for many thousands of Hindus. It was also the best beach holiday you could possibly imagine. Literally miles of golden sand. At the top of the sand dunes stood a row of houses, each belonging to the major Calcutta companies and it was in these that we would stay. Each one had its own character and set the tone for the holiday. Shaw Wallace was very comfortable, a white villa set about with bougainvillea and gated and fenced from the beach. Next door, on the right was J Thomas, a grey, somewhat brooding house, with a supposed ghost of a memsahib who had come down to Puri and killed herself there. Nevertheless, it was a great holiday house, somewhat shabby, lovely books to read and a massive roof that my friends and I could sleep  on so that we looked up at the bright sky at night and could watch dawn come over the horizon in the early morning. Next was small, unassuming bungalow - Metal Box, where the aunties and Desmond would stay. A little further on was Andrew Yule, grey, rather pedestrian and remembered by  me largely for a holiday spent playing endless games of Hearts and 3/5/7 with my father, Annabel and Harish. At the far end of this stretch of beach, tucked behind casurina trees and with the Governor of Orissa's beach side holiday home bordering it on the left, stood the Williams and Magor house. Incredibly comfortable and rather grand, it was always my favourite.

These holidays always started with a journey, either overnight  by train or, later on many hours by car. The first time we went all of us were in one large carriage. Jo and Mary, my parents and me. Jo set up a chula on the floor and cooked something miraculous and we chugged through the night to Puri. We were woken at Bhubeneshwar with tea - that cry of, "chai, gurram chai", echoing along the platform, most of the men on the train getting off to look at the engine and a sense of excitement beginning to build. From the station everything would be unloaded into a convoy of cycle rickshaws and we would set off for the house and the holiday.



Jo would normally find where the fishermen kept their home distilled brew and, always, on the first night, would get roaring drunk and then be desperately hungover for the  next few days. He would retreat to his quarters and be seen for at least three days. For this was Jo and Mary's holiday too.

There are huge waves in Puri and a vicious undercurrent; swimming had to be undertaken only with assistance of a fisherman who knew the water and would use his conical straw helmet to provide buoyancy and a passage through the waves. My mother couldn't swim and so never went beyond the shallows, preferring to lie lizard-like, smothered in coconut oil under the anvil of the sun. The rest of us swam, surfed and played in the water until lunchtime when we staggered up the burning sand to a lunch of prawn curry or any fresh fish caught that morning. It was then the ubiquitous rest time when the adults went to sleep and I went quietly mad from boredom.

In the late afternoon it was time to climb aboard the cycle rickshaws again and be pedalled to the bazaar where we would look for Puri silk, the softest and prettiest of hand loomed silks, exquisite silver filigree jewellery and for adults, the Puri equivalent of the seaside postcard, carvings depicting extremely contorted and almost impossible sex. After this we would ride along the Bengali Seaside taking in the colour and excitement of a much more populated stretch of beach.

Come the evening it was entertainment time and we were all expected to produce an act that we would show to the others as a cabaret. This varied from Janie and her then boyfriend producing a very skilled song and dance act, to me showing everyone how Isadora Duncan would have danced (I really was a precocious child) to my darling mother - in a loincloth bikini dancing on a table to Fire while the rest of us spun around her tapping sticks in, what must have seemed to any stranger, some arcane ritual for fertility or rain. My father, as the audience of one, was not amused. Later on when I got older, the evening would finish with a mad dash to the beach for a nude frolicking in the phosphorescent sea.

We would sit on the beach and marvel at the world as it went by: sadhus, trinket sellers with shells and the dessicated husks of seahorses and the temple elephants being walked by the sea for their daily exercise, very often in a state of high elephantine excitement. Very big, elephants. We would walk up to the fishing village to watch the boats come in and buy that night's supper fresh from the nets.


Once, we saw a giant turtle laid on her back making soft, heartbreaking cries. In those days the Grand Hotel still made turtle soup and this poor creature was destined to travel, alive, to Calcutta to be eaten the next day as a great delicacy. We didn't know then, as I certainly know now, that giant turtles always return to where they were hatched to lay their own eggs. What we did all understand was that this almost human distress was unbearable. Negotiations started: at first 1,000 rupees was asked for, Mum laughed gaily, 500 then, maybe but better 400. Our fishermen were outraged, the middleman would only pay 50 rupees and probably only sell it themselves for 100. Nevertheless this was the price agreed and it was paid. The turtle was turned over and pushed toward the sea. It lumbered, ungraceful on land, and, as she reached the waters edge her head turned, showing a gentle face with tear tracks. She looked directly at my mother for a long time, two old souls in mutual recognition, and also I like to think in thanks.