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.

Sunny days

It is odd how the weather can affect our mood - when I am in the deep throes of depression a sunny day can seem like an insult - my condition seems to demand a metonymy of the the weather. Equally when I am happy those leaden grey February afternoons seem to reach into my very being and drag me down. When I am depressed however, those same grey afternoons seem apposite and give me a gentle pleasure in the misery.

It is said that we all remember our childhood as a time of sunshine, a time when the seasons played their parts accurately and there was snow on the ground every Christmas and that the greenwood laughed from May to September. Not so easy if you grew up, as I did, in a tropical climate. My youth is certainly a reflection of sunlight, that or the endless rain of the monsoon but an Indian childhood does not lend itself so willingly to such halcyon nostalgia.

I do have time memories where the weather seems to fit the scene; Kalimpong for example was prone to fog and yet I remember none - a less happy holiday was spent in Darjeeling and that I remember as being dank and dingy - riding out to see the snows int the early morning and barely being able to see the rump of the horse in front.

I know it never rained in Puri - just endless days of sunshine and starlit nights, the roar of the breakers providing the lullaby that sent us to sleep. And yet it must have done because I remember grey days when we went to Konarak because it was not a good day for the beach. Once we took a picnic to the beach a Konarak and buried the beer at the water's edge so it would be cold after we had swum. Well - swimming was impossible, if Puri presented a challenge the undertow at Konarak was terrifying. We retreated to the sand and started to dig for the beer, and dug, and dug. The shift in the undertow had carried our beer from below the sand and taken it away as a libation for the Sun God and his Chariot.
Luckily one of the children who had appeared from nowhere shinned up a tree and cut us down dabs which we drank in grateful gulps.

My memory of home is always the cold weather - like a perfect English summer day, warm but not too hot, needing a cardigan at night or the drenching refreshment of the monsoon and the joy of the rain. So really I suppose ,just like everyone else, my another country has its own perfect weather.

Time to remember and to reflect

I have had a frustrating few weeks - Blogger has been down and I have been reduced to my little green leather notebook which holds very few thoughts unless written in haiku form. Not really what I wanted to say. Sad news in my email inbox today - the death of another Calcutta wallah, Val Cowie. Many of us, I know. remember the Cowie boys for their extraordinary niceness and the their untimely deaths whilst still in their teens. Another tie that bound us has gone.

As a small baba at Woodlands Estates I showed off my newly found prowess on my bicycle and the Cowie boys had the grace not to laugh at my falls and slow peddling - this while they were doing wheelies long before they were invented. It was through them that my generation came to realise the cruelness and inevitability of death - it was not merely for the old but took from among us young  as well.

I have mentioned before the restlessness that drove my mother to explore - for one cold weather we drove out to Diamond Harbour every Sunday for a picnic. The name sounds romantic and it certainly was an important entrance up the Hooghly in case a seaborne invasion. It was a bay rather than a harbour, not mooring and very few ships. What there was was mud, deep, cool and squelchy between the toes. Bliss after a two hour car ride. When I had finished staining my legs with black river mud we would assemble at the river's edge and drink sweet tea and eat cheese sandwiches. We rarely saw anything other that the occasional goat. My paddling was brought to an abrupt end when someone saw a cobra sunning itself by a low wall. Oddly enough so did the trips to Diamond Harbour.

One Easter some friends of mine and Annabel's offered us a weekend in Bandal - great excitement to be going somewhere new and for a whole weekend. We travelled by train from Howrah, up river to the old Dutch settlement which now housed the Goodyear Tyre factory. Owen, our host lived and worked in the compound. It was a silly weekend - we played scrabble and endless games of cards - talked poetry into the night. I went for a very romantic walk with Pico Bobb that started quite a long relationship. In the middle of the second night, Annabel and I were sharing a bed and had the most extraordinary thing happen - instantaneously we screamed the train was going to run us over and woke up clinging to one another. There was  no need to explain - we had had the nightmare. We saw little of Bandal although I did manage a visit to the cathedral, erected after several ship survived a ferocious storm, and for a long time had a medal of Our Lady of Bandal in my purse.

Between Bandal and Calcutta was Chandernagor, the French settlement that, unlike Bandal, had had no factory to extent its life. It was a ghost town of fin de siecle building with street signs in French and Bengali - an eerie reminder of days past. There was still a convent run by French nuns and my friend Maureen Banon took me there once to see her mother. I seem to remember that it didn't feel very peaceful and that the fever bird was in full song.

Strange how this stretch of marshy isthmus drew the great powers to stake their claim to it, to build their trading stations along its banks: strangest of all perhaps that Calcutta from Job Charnock's humble beginnings flowered into a world city that drew people from all over the globe onto its sinking and shifting soil. The great Ganges delta is something that our beloved Hooghly is a part of and it is perhaps that that brings us back again and again to those places close by the river, to be some part of a larger whole not just literally but spiritually as well.

Related articles

• Film review: Satyajit Ray's Days and Nights in the Forest (tangleofwires.wordpress.com)
• H is for Hooghly (kolkataeats.com)
• India: Calcutta, the capital of culture (telegraph.co.uk)

Blue days

I am having one of those horrid nights 0 you know the ones where you feel dog tired but a soon as the light goes off a million unbidden thoughts start to race around you head. Even a double dose sleeping pill hasn't worked so  I fall back to the blog.

One of the side effects of the medication is that I feel disconnected and find it hard to write which in itself raises dilemma - do I stay here and perish with that sadman or join the madmen running free (David Bowie for those of.  you too young to remember.) It is lovely to wake without that pressure of dread of another day to be endured. But, and this is a big but, that's the last real feeling I have all day.

I would welcomse feedback - answers on an email joannawatkin@yahoo.co,uk

xxxxxx