The Fortight from Hell

It all started so innocently. The computer was proving to be a little slow warming up - it was taking anything up to twenty minutes to load! I went to the Apple Shop ( what a blissful place) and was handed over to a genius - very comforting. He said my hard drive was dead and I needed a new one!!!! Shock horror, not only financially but also my means of communication to the world would be interrupted. Still I bit the bullet, handed over my hard saved cash and and trusted to his genius skills - who am I to query a genius?

Two days later it was back together with the latest state of the art operating system - Lion - I believe.

Then the sodding dingle wouldn't work. I was stranded, out of reach of my friends - this was the computer nerd's nightmare scenario. turned out I needed a new zippier dongle - £40.00 pounds later I had it but it still didn't work!!!!

This was getting serious - I was getting text messages from friends of friends wanting to know if I
was aright. So - back to the Apple Store I went. Turned out the sim card in the dongle hadn't been inserted properly.

So there you are - I am back.

Oh yes and Peter the blind neighbour almost died form a bad attack of Crones so that's a two bus journey every day to keep and eye on him and make sure they don't just forget about him. The National Health service is wonderful but they neglect the more vulnerable if they think there is no one who care. But I do so all is well.

Oh - how I long for Calcutta at times like these - just to get away from what Tom Paine called. "the times that try men's souls".

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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Shopping in the New Market

I have to confess that despite my hymn of praise to the dress buying experience the other day, I hate shopping and most particularly shopping malls. Poor Basingstoke really doesn't stand a chance.

It has to do with, like so much else in my life, Calcutta, and how the experience of shopping there formed my buying habits. To shop in Calcutta was to walk into an adventure. The New Market, a Victorian mall in fact, was laid out in such a way as to invite you to experience the world. Avenues of shoe shops, side alleys filled with flowers, curio shops that would have had Dickens frantically rewriting The Old Curiosity Shop.

To go with my mother as a small baba meant following her to Empire Stores where jealously guarded imported goods were produced like jewels for her inspection: tins of baked beans, canned smoked oysters and even Kool Aid were brandished and bought. Further on the meat market, best walked through with a fixed stare and holding one's breath. We went through and out the other side - the cook was sent to buy the meat. Just next door the fish market - again the smell was overwhelming but here we would stop and look for lobsters, bekti and hilsa. Huge prawns would be added to the growing pile of goods that Old Buddha balanced on his head.

I would always beg to go through the animal markets, birds, parrots and budgerigars, rabbiits, white and pied and monkeys - oh how I wanted a monkey. All it took however to make me quiet again was the repetition of how if bitten I would have to have ten injections - all in my stomach - to innoculate me against rabies. Even now, I hesitate to pat a strange dog such was the power of that particular moral tale.

All provision shopping done we would head into the main market with its lanes and alleys spiralling out from the centre where, at Christmas, the Chinese would sell paper chains and lanterns. A favourite stop was Chumbu Lama, a tiny shop owned by a Tibetan refugee - in a similar manner to Emipire Stores he would reach into the back of the shop and treasures would be brought out to be viewed. Exquisite bronze buddhas, ropes of turquoise and coral; the tresaures of a refugee race forced to sell their heritage to live in a strange land. Every piece had a story and most were heart breaking. I don't remember Mum buying much - simply listening and sometimes returning with Desmond or letting Chogyal know that soemthing rare was in the bazaar.

Shopping done it was off to Flurys for cake and coffee, or in my case coke.

As I grew older I would fo on my own or with my freinds and we would spend hours trying on shoes, buying thirty of forty of the beautifully coloured glass bangles that would match our dresses and leave us with myriad cuts on our arms when the bangles inevetably broke. At one point I was sent to see if anyone was selling tiger skins - of course they were and so much more beside. A moira (a whicker stool) could be ordered and hashish packed into the seat and then sent by freight to the UK or US. For a time I felt like Mata Hari.

You see with memories like these - a sterile mall filled with shops that are all identical is no place for real shopping. Sadly those paper Christmas decorations caused a fire that consumed Hogg's New Market and although it has been restored I believe much of its charm has been sanitised. Memories can't have that happen to them thank God.

Friends, Romans and Countrymen

Desmond had decided to have a roof party with dancing and singing and laughter followed by some slides he had found of his first trip to Bhutan, back in the days when there was no road. He was one of the only joutnalists escorting Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi on her official visit there.

We had to wait for the night sky so everyone was talking and drinking when suddenly, spontaneously a friends of Desla and my mother jumped up on one of the service pipes that crisscrossed the roof of Minto Park. It took awhile for people to stop talking and that made it all the more real.

His voice rang out, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend my you ears" and he gave the speech with such passion and belief  that we were no longer on a hot roof top in West Bengal but transported to Shakespeare's Rome and the anger and the fury at the death of Caesar. For me it was an awakening - to Shakespeare who I promptly went off and read cover to cover, skimming the bits I could not understand but loving the language that I could.

Dean Gaspar was his name - another renaissance man, he could paint, draw, act and write. He was exciting and wicked - so much so that his parties were ones that I was never allowed to go to. He was another of the men who set me free with books - no question was too trivial and I adored him as some form of exotic uncle.

I have never seen Mark Antony played better and he gave me the greatest gift anyone can give an impressionable child - Shakespeare.

After he had finished we sat in the dark illuminated dimly by candles and watched as Desmond took us to another place and another time when the way into Bhutan was on foot and the journey took days not hours, It was a night of magic lantern slides and an all too brief glimpse of a man who, in different circumstances, would have ranked with the Richardsons, Oliviers and Gielguds. But my Calcutta was like that - always roses blooming from unexpected places. He did achieve celluloid immortality appearing in Attenborough's Gandhi and doing so very well.

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