Happy sadness, dark light

It is that saddest of times and that happiest of times: to be child is to make this night almost unbearably slow with the certain knowledge that joy would follow in the morning. To be an adult alone it is almost unbearably sad to know that no joy comes in the morning -simply another day to be endured like so many others, only on this day there is premium for us lonely people to pay - we must smile and look like we are enjoying the season. I suppose faith might help but having little time for organised religion it looks a doubtful lifesaver.

Last year as many of you know I offended my sister with my 'humorous' remarks. I have seen her three times this year. She drives me mad but I miss her.

I have been fighting the demon voices this last week  -the ones that say no-one will miss you, the world would be an easier place without you in it, you're a waste of space of oxygen of state money. And - it is all true. And it is all true except when I come to the blog and 16,000 of you have read it and that 16,000 people know I am alive and find some worth in what I write and so for tonight the angels win.

Depression is lonely, hard to explain and fight. Christmas is not a time to be depressed and it is harder to fight now that at any other time of the year. So I hope your Yuletide is happy and bright and that 2012 brings us all the hope and happiness we all deserve. "God bless us everyone" , as Tiny Tim would say.

A Puri holiday

When we first went to Puri we went by train. We had a whole carriage for ourselves and Joe and Mary. There was no airconditioning  in those early days so we slid the carriage doors open and with our legs dangling over the side of the train as we rolled through West Bengal, Bihar and finally Puri.

Joe was in charge of provisions for the trip and he had come prepared - with a chula! ( For those of you that don't know; a chula is an improvised barbecue and hot plate. It runs on wood and dried cow dung.) The carriage filled with acrid smoke very quickly but before we knew plates of curry, rice and parathas - and it was the food of the gods. Joe had worked his masmorojin  and the smoke cleared eventually, although I do remember something about a hole in the middle of the floor!

Later trips were by car and always set off in the very early morning. They always started with violent rows between my mother and my father and then it  was time to shoehorn ourselves into the cars. My parents deciding to travel separately - thank God!

In our car there George to drive, Abdul for a holiday and then me, Mum and Janie (unless her boyfriend came too in which case she would disown us and regally waved as they passed us by. The first pit stop was at a  Sikh roadside restaurant where the made the best alloo parathas ever. By now West Bengal was behind us and we were about leave Bihar for Orrissa. Once into Orrissa the landscape began to change, the were forests of trees, still lagoons of water and once - on a special day twelve sadhus riding elephants on their way to a mela.

My parents had settles into an uneasy truce and kept sniping at one another every time we stopped - when we saw the elephants Mum wanted to stop and talk to the sadhus about where they going and why on elephants. Dad fumed silently and then got into his car and pushed off leaving us behind.

That last part of the journey was the hardest - we passed Bhubaneshwar, then Pipli and then only 30 miles left to Puri. The journey felt as if it would never end but it did and there was the sea and the sand and the promise of a holiday only India could provide.

To be continued....

Aya Toofan

Imagine this - early morning, about 5.30. A mist rolls in from the river making everything chilled and for those of us just coming home a little cold in our finery. In the centre of the maidan, the Victoria Memorial stands to the right of  the racecourse: the reason for all of us being there so early. This was in my jockey days and I was often coming from a sleepless night of passion to watch the latest inamorata ride out as the horses came to the track for their early morning workouts and gallops.

I would sit , yawning and sated, lazily looking around me as the obsessed fiddled, cursing with binoculars as they peered through the mist to see who was working well, how much the jockey had kept in hand on his gallop, My mother would rarely have her horses do more than an eight anna gallop - she felt the horse left the race behind him on the track and needed to be fit for Saturday,

Recaffinanted I would go home and bathe and then set out to meet the others - on a Wednesday the handicaps came out and we would go to Flurys, drink hot chocolate and plot and plan the betting that would take place over the weekend. If it was Tolly race time my parents would inevitably fall into a row where my mother would accuse my father of not having a clue how to handicap and him telling her she had no idea how to run one. They really didn't speak to each other again until Friday.

If it was RCTC time I was in love with my jockey, who was married with a wife in England, far enough away to make it seem OK. Of course  it wasn't but he was special and I loved him so a few months for two years were better than nothing at all.

From the small baba who had believed that racing was about the exit form the starting gate I had arrived as a seasoned race goer. I bet and sometimes won. My best ever bet was on a horse called Aya Toofan, which roughly translates to Here Comes the Storm. It was monsoon and the sky was black - I had a hundred rupees left and I put it all to win on the horse. Everyone in our box and the box next door laughed at me.

The race started as the storm started, black clouds emptying their rain like sheets of bullets, thunder rolling around the track and forked lightening finding its way into ground all around us. A great cheer went up form the crowd - "Aya Toofan!"- as he splashed past the winning post some two lengths clear of everything else in the race. The price - 50/1. Not bad for no sentiment in racing.

There was a party that night as we danced the night away until the wee small hours and then rubbing our eyes headed back to the track.

The Witching Hour . Whateve

It is 3.30 in the morning and I am sitting up in bed, cross legged writing this because my brain will simply not accept that this is sleep time.I have been sitting here desperately trying to think of small baba tales to entertain you with and all that is doing is to make sleep waft gently away as smoke from a lit cigarette leaves its toxic cloud quietly above your face.

Awhile ago, when I seemed to have lost my voice for writing I saw a crappy Sunday afternoon film - one of those made for TV movies firmly rooted in the rom com genre. It had a happy ending of course but it made me cry and cry. I don't know why, maybe the protagonist's loss of both parents, maybe the death of the little girl's father. Whatever the reason I cried for two days - not subtle gentle tears that slide eloquently down the face but loud whooping tears and snot. And then I realised - I had never really cried for Mum or Dad and exhausting and terrifying as it was it was also like lancing a boil. I slept for another two days and felt as if a burden had been lifted.

To reach the sunlight when one suffers from depression is a scary thing, the black clouds are always there at your back." But oh my dears and oh my friends it is a lovely light ",as Edna St Vincent Millais would say of candle light.

It is however transient and I wish I could sit here now and say that all in the garden is roses and buttercups but it isn't. There are days when I want to die and days when all I want to do is lay down in a darkened room and stop this carousel world for a few brief moments of respite. I understand the frustrations of those of you love me - I get frustrated too and long for normality and certitude. Long to find Pollyanna again and be more like the small baba with all her confidence and love." Maybe this time..."

Dichotomy

I both love and hate this time of year. I love the lights and the music and the excitement of the children as they boil over with the wonder of it all. I hate the vulgarity, the incessant need for more money to buy better presents. One of the great philosophers said, and I can't remember who, that if god didn't exist then we would have to invent  him. I think the same is true of Christmas. There is some innate part of us that longs to join in, to sing the carols to light the lights and to buy the presents.

Small baba Christmasses were all about the excitement and worry - no chimney so how Santa Claus come down it? Turns out he was pretty nifty through the air conditioner grille.

Christmas dinner was a heaving table with all those who needed to share in our Christmas, Desmond and all the boys, George Landau and Dorothy and any waif of stray picked up be any of us that needed not to be alone over the holiday. After the meal the Aussies and New Zealanders rolled up and the party went well into the small hours with laughter and dancing.

I think about those days of wonder as I write this - my Christmas this year will be spent with the blind neighbour - I am going to cook for both of us. We may not dance the night away but I hope it will be a happy day and one that I can put into my memory box to join all the other happy times.

Happy Holidays to all of you wherever you may be.

Mountains

It was August and it was hot - very hot and very humid. The plan had been to go to Kalimpong for all of August and to get home in time for the Monsoon Race Season. Sadly this was the time that my mother and Desmond were considered spies and none of us could get permits.

We were all upset - my mother cried and we all felt anger at the injustice of it all. We had also been planning a big mountain party for Desla's birthday. Then we got a phone call to come to Minto Park for the party.

We went with bad grace - a party on the eighth floor of a block of flats overlooking Bhowanipur cemetery was not the same as Bloody Marys with aunties and a view of Kanchenjunga.

We arrived at base camp - Desla had taken his tents from the Annapurna trip and set them up in the living room. We were to cook on little camping gas stoves and drink Calcutta Bloody Marys. We sat in the tent and imagined the wind and snow whistling around us. Desmond told us stories of his hunt for the yeti and showed us the skin of a blue bear that he had been told was that of yeti. He told of how to escape the Yeti's clutches by turning your face in the opposite way that you were running and he told us that the yeti would kill men but take women to mate with.

As the night wore it grew  hotter inside the nylon tents but no one moved - it was a night of magic and wonder and only got better when the Nepalese boys brought out the drum and guitars and we started to dance. Desla surpassing us with 'Naintala'

I don't remember going home but I dreamed of yetis and mountains and how one man could so entrance us all that we felt we had returned to our beloved mountains for one night more.

Things of beauty

I was very blessed - I had an eye for beauty in all its shapes and guises for a very young age - I guess as a result of being a permanent appendage on my mother and Desmond. I went where they went, read the same books and was not so much introduced to beauty as surrounded with it in its all its physical form and metaphysical forms.

There were always beautiful people around and art and sculpture and silk. I accepted beauty as a mundanity - it was part of my childhood just as much as the bustees and refugees were.

The most beautiful man I ever saw was Lennie Dorje on a trip to Bhutan, when he arrived as we sat round a fire pi - he was dressed all in red and carried pistol at his side. ( This was only a short time since his brother Jigme had been assassinated. I was all of 9 or 10 and something inside me went WOW! His beauty was tempered be the threat of danger that surrounded him and although I was sent to bed early I know they stayed up into the night drinking and playing cards. I think you could say that glamour had entered my life and I loved it.

Tahctzung or Tiger's Nest is must see adventure if you are a visitor to Bhutan and we were duly taken part way by donkeys and climbing on foot. The monastery is high over the Pairo valley and when we visited it was a tranquil place. Desmond found an old lama whose window framed the most perfect view for meditation, a valley, mountains and a river. It was inspirational and to this day I have only to close my eyes to see it. It was beautiful.

I suppose I was about 14 when the penny dropped that I was not beautiful, at least not on the outside - it was hard for awhile but I tried to beautiful on the inside to make up for it. I suppose that was when I realised that I had been given a great gift; not being beautiful myself I could treasure it in others. I'll tonight with a little Leonard Cohen at the Chelsea Hotel - both he and Janis Joplin forgot their beauty was in there music, their voices and their poetry of song.

Fashion icon?

There were two women's charitable organisations in Calcutta that produced exquisite needle work. They had been set up to provide women with work that they could do and still continue their normal day to day life. They were the Good Companions and the Women's Friendly Society. Every Christmas I would be given satin slippers embroidered with pink rosebuds and a matching tissue box. My mother would get a jewellery roll -you get the picture.

Good Companions had a doll hospital hidden behind a swing door - ~i imagined the dolls lying in their dolly beds waiting for the doll doctor to come and make them better - fixing an errant eye, realigning a rickety head or sewing up a sagging teddy. It was a terrible shock when I got older and realised that the toys were just placed on a shelf in the stockroom and to wait their turn.

The Women's Friendly specialised in the most beautiful party dresses and every year I was primped and pricked in order to walk down the catwalk at Tolly and show off one or two of the dresses. I did not enjoy this - the petticoats prickled and the elastic on my little ballet pumps was always too tight. But my mother always made me do it and made me feel as if I had a starring role. I would walk to the end of the runway, curtsy to the British High Commissioner's wife and then walk slowly back. And yes - she always bought the dresses for me to wear to parties. My cousin Sarah still had one sent back to England for her to wear to show off at parties here. I believe her own little girl had worn it too.

If you think about it these were revolutionary 'good works'. Committees formed by women for the betterment and advancement of women and all done in the fifties and sixties - I think Good Companions predated WW2. Friendly societies were the backbone of the early trade unionists and yet all this was being done by the memsahibs who would have been horrified at the idea they were spreading the germ of feminism. But they were.

Even better than that they gave me a chance to be, albeit briefly, a style icon on the catwalk. Sadly my modelling career floundered when I got to be seven and refused point black to ushered into any more of those frivolous, beautiful, exquisite frocks.

Comfort

There is a great deal to be said for being comfortable - easy on the ageing bone structure, relaxation and a general sense of well being but... There is physical comfort; the soft sofa or bed, the heating turned up to a cosy warmth, the taste of the first coffee of the morning. There is economic comfort - having enough money to do the day to day things you want with a little left over for the impulse buy.

And then there is spiritual comfort, the comfort of another's presence, the calm of pure faith that gives comfort in times alone. When asked if she was in pain at the end of her days my mother would only say that she was uncomfortable - I took her word for it and thought she suffered little - it was only when the morphine appeared that I realised her discomfort was agony and by then it was too late to offer her the moral comfort I should have given her before.

That is the trouble with English - we have so many words that have multiple meanings, and within those meanings so many nuances and degrees  of meaning that we lose our sensitivity to certain words.

Comfort for me is a hug, warmth and an absence of stress. For others it may be many different things, their own home, their relationship or even simply the day to day mundanity that reassures.

We seek out comfort, long for it and treasure it when we find it - even a soft sofa can bring joy and comfort and as Christmas approaches and we hear the words of the carol "tidings of comfort and joy" we realise that our 21st century comfort has an ancestry that is old as mankind. We all seek that comfort and joy in our lives. I hope we all have some chance of finding it.

Baba

Dear small baba,

This is me to you. I was thinking of all the things we did and the happiness thereof and I wanted to link somehow back to that Joanna baba rather than the slightly loopy adult I have become.

Do you remember what fun we had with Joe - learning masmorigin (magic) and how we loved him and grieved when he left. George, Mums' driver had been having an affair with his wife Rosie and poor Joe was broken hearted fro loved Rosie deeply. I know we never really forgave George for that and certainly the tales Abdul told us later only proved what poor Joe already knew - George was a bad man. He was money lender and extortionist. Do you remember how Abdul would curl up on the floor and tell us all of his, George's, wickedness.

And yet - he made us laugh, drove us everywhere and bought me/you a gold signet ring for out fourteenth birthday. And his lawyer was a hegira in his spare time - what inquisitive young mind could hold out against trying to find out more.

You know little baba, we were very lucky - so many people in our lives and yet we remained so Innocent of all the real horrors.

Do you remember going to the New Market with Mum - old Buddha following behind and Mum like a galleon in full sail sweeping way through to Empire Stores to do the shopping. The schadenfreude of the pet market where pleas were made to at least save some of the white rabbits or green parrots. the flowers, the spices, the smells and then if we were lucky to Flurry's for cake and coke.

My dear little baba, I would not have you know then what I know now but ~I wish I could go back in time and tell you to treasure every second like gold dust for it was an enchanted childhood and we were so lucky to have had it.

All my love to your darling memory
Your older yet no wiser self
Joanna

Famous Blue Raincoat

It's four in the morning....

You know that insomnia is one of things we all think we get from time to time when we have a few nights of bad sleep. The real thing is insidious - it marks itself as a kind of frenetic night time energy where the brain keeps going rather like one is on speed. You are tired but there is no gentle lulling to sleep, no snuggling beneath the covers, venting that deep breath before sleep so blissfully comes. Instead you lie there - stiff - feeling every lump in the mattress, cursing every street light. Or, if you are me, you give into it and write or play Farmville or watch The West Wing for the 20th time.

It wasn't always thus; I remember a time when sleep and I were good friends. Night time and bed time were to be looked forward to, to the passive and peaceful ravelling of the day's cares, enjoying "sore nature's bath".

To those of you still, loyally, read this - any ideas - 'cos the pills aren't working and I am so tired, so very tired. I think the four o'clock I will try hot chocolate and lying still in the dark. And pray that the insidious thoughts of failure, despair and homesickness will take a short lived holiday from my brain.

Seems to me. that it has been rather a long time since I wrote on of these - haven't had much to say really and didn't want to bore you all with all the depression stuff. Still a bit short of things to say but here goes.

When I was a small baba the world, it seemed, revolved around me. With that glorious innocence and selfishness that only the very young possess I was convinced that I lived in a universe that existed only to serve me and make me happy.

My mother saw that and wanting a well rounded child, not a possible sociopath, tried very hard to show me that there was wide world out there and many, many others also existed in it and had no idea of my small little place in the scheme of things. She took me to Shsihu Bhawan to show me Mother Theresa's orphans - children thrown onto rubbish heaps barely alive in their first wavering cries among the dung and detritus of a bustling city.

She took me to work with Father Andrew with sone the of drug addicts at his house out at Dum Dum. She opened my eyes to another world and for all the blunting of emotions that living in Calcutta can give you over time she taught me to see beyond the world of Chowrighee and Park St.

Calcutta was a very poor city - a place where people lived cheek by jowl with gut wrenching poverty and disease and it was there for all to see - played on the stage of the city streets. We all learned to live with it - to become blind to the pot bellied malnourished children, the stick thin rikshaw wallahs coughing their tubercular coughs as they pulled us from the New Market to Park St,

It struck me as I started to write this that some of you have thought that my love affair with my city is somehow myopic .... but no, I saw, I felt the pain and I still do.

Insomnia

The hardest thing about living outside a bustling town is the lack of noise. On, we have the occasional urban all to arms with ambulances and fire truck but for the night - it lacks noise. This doesn't mean I want Monaco every day but there is something comforting about a car that passes by in the small hours of the day.

Those of you that know and understand insomnia will be convinced  that routine helps -turn one's room into a place to read and sleep - soften the lighting and make sure the sheets are clean and ironed. A hot milky drink may help: sadly not if you are over 50 - for women it brings on hot flushes and for men it it gives whole meaning to the phrase keep the knees crossed.

i always slept well in Calcutta - the combination of the air conditioner, the durwan downstairs chatting to his pal to pass the night away. I loved howling at the moon at a quarter to four in the morrning, It was never peaceful even then. As we found our way home we would see the truck arriving with the beggars on board ready for another day. Oftentimes we would see them being loaded back up as the evening mist began to fall and the cinemas and the the New Market shut for night. Most of them lived under one of the pylons under Howrah Bridge.. I imagine their masters did well but what choice to the very young have to be children. Sometimes when I can't sleep I see their faces pressed against the car window. It doesn't help at all.

Writing is the one thing that truly helps so now that I am nice and sleepy - goodnight xxx

ps - It won't stop me dreaming about those kids with their arms bent back so that their soft muscles  would deform into a begging injusry, or even the beggars with leprosy - holes where their noses should have been. Or saddest of all the babies doped with opium to stop them crying.

Come to think of it maybe a quiet night counting my blessings is best after all.

Glumbles

I have been feeling a little glum lately and in the need of some cheering up - watched the whole of The West Wing again - second time and decided that there really can be too much of a good thing. I think it is boredom rather than misery that leads to the glumness - sitting around with nothing to do but think what a crappy life I lead is really not helpful.

Then I rediscovered my secret weapon - reading. I bought the new Karin Slaughter today and have already devoured 80 pages of it. I am transported to another place and another way of living. It reminded me of the lonely little baba voraciously reading everything is sight.

When we went to Puri my constant grumble was that I had nothing to read - I devoured books like rose and violet creams - fast and in one sitting. In desperation my mother turned to the caretaker of the bungalow, Mr Dasgupta and asked if he had anything I might read. He did - Satre and Simone de Beauvoir. At eleven I became somewhat of an expert on existentialism. When I had exhausted his Satre library I was moved on to Hermann Hess - The Glass Bead Game, Siddhartha and Stepenwoolf. Much of the content must have gone over my head and yet to this day the mention of Hess or Sartre will transport me to a sandy beach with crashing breakers and the bright sun illuminating the pages of the book.

Back hone in Calcutta the American School let me loose in the library with their classics - it was there that I read Freud and Kant while at the same time swapping comics with my classmates. It did not seem much of a leap from the interpretation of dreams to life with Archie and his pals.

My point, I think, is this - you can never be bored if you have a book. Reading is humanity's greatest accomplishment - more so than writing because even the back of cereal packet can conjure wonder in the enquiring mind. I always used to make my kids keep reading diaries and they were required to mention everything they read. My favourite entry - "I read my sister's diary last night - it was boring". For him maybe but not for me.

Writing is important too - writing this has helped remove the last of the glumbles that that were clinging on to the crevices of my mind.

Seasons of the sun

Seems ages since I have written of these - put it down to medicartion and idleness. Still here I am sending my thoughts across world scattered be the wild west wind .

I was thinking about Calcutta last week - we had a very few hot and humid days and I realised that even my rose tintec spectacles could not dim tha memry of the heat adn the hunidity but we were lucky - air conditiong and swimming pools made the heat bearable. The west wiinds that have come bringing welcome rain made me think of the joy of the monsoon and I went outside and stood under the raindrops soakingin the cool.

The cold weather when it came was time for picnics - out along the DumDum road ooking for a splace big enough for all of us and the chula. Picnics were not cod ham but biriani or chicken curry eaten from china plates with cokes for the childrne and beer for the grown ups. Desmon would sketch the vivied green of the rice paddies around us and the village chldren surroud us asking questions, who were we? Where from? Were we so poor we had to eat outside? We would play them the Beatles and they would fuistly run and then curiousty overcome them they woull cme closed to hear the music.

The rich and the well to do had summer houses out along the DumDum rroad and it was these we would go to as we got older. Still biriani for lucnh but with the run of the house there was someehre comfotable to sit. Games were order of the day: badmiston and rounders with the occsional attmept at cricket - needless to say I sat those out. As the day progressed so did the intakee of beer and about 5 o'clock we would pack up the tha cars and make ou away home to change for an evening at Trinca s ot the Blue Fox.

We led charmed life - punctuated by parties, picnics and racing. Golden time for a gilded youth and wasn't I lucky to be a part of it?

The Games We Play

I got some lovely blog feedback today - thank you for bothering because it is nice not to feel that I am writing into a vacuum. I also had some good advice,  to remove myself from the comforter of nostalgia and try and link the past and present. Dear Dubby never makes it easy....

I was remembering today the games that kept me amused on those seemingly endless afternoons when the grownups 'rested' and I was supposed to be napping. Of course I did no such thing - I spent the time in a world of my own making where great events took place in an ever changing room where the furniture became horses, wagons and day beds in palaces.

My favourite game was the Rani of Jhansi - mounted on the end of the bed I led my faithful soldiers into dreadful battles against the awful imperialist who were trying to take my throne. I never faltered in ordering death for the captured and it was only when playing a version of it with a friend that I was reminded that I was one of those perfidious English myself. How unfair! It instilled in me a hatred of imperialism and conquest and a deep respect for the culture of others. It made me think too - how could such a small country hold such power over India. Divide and rule was the received wisdom but it took many years to understand the thinking behind it - if the Americans believe in manifest destiny, Britain believed in her God given right to rule the world - to create an empire. Suppression of strong, intelligent rulers like the Rani of Jhansi and putting in puppet rajas helped a small race subjugate a whole sub continent.

My games taught me empathy - I loved riding on the wagon train but for me the best part was to be caught by Indians and walk through the forest in bare feet with my hair in braids and be at one with the wilderness of the American West. Reading about Custer and seeing films like Cheyenne Autumn made me realise that again a small group of Europeans imposed their ways and almost created a genocide as they cleared the Wilderness in their race to the west.

Far more fun was to be Isadora Duncan and dance with billowing lengths of cloth to Chopin and Mozart. Occasionally I would get above myself and try for Anna Pavlova dancing to Saint Saen and dying a fluttering swan on tottery tip toes.

By the time everyone else had woken up (and they did sleep) I was exhausted and delighted to be taken off to Tolly for tea and a swim. My newly burgeoning social conscience could not help but notice how different to my world was that outside the car window but I was not brave enough or indeed old enough to be able to formulate my thoughts and actions. Someone wise once said to me that it was not for me to go down but to try and make those less fortunate find their way up. Seems to me to be as good a definition of socialism as I could find.

Those afternoons tempered me and made me the person I am now so thank you to the Rani of Jhansi, Chief Sitting Bull, Isadora Duncan and Anna Pavlova - you gave me such a rich childhood.