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.
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.
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