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....

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.

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.

Have you ever heard the saying,'the triumph of optimism over experience'? Well, that pretty much summed up my mother. She was always up for a challenge - if she knew nothing about she would learn, absorbing new ideas like a sponge.

She adored expensive perfume, sadly something I share with her - why on why can't I be happy with the odd drop of patchouli? One of the hardest things to go without in Calcutta was her perfume - even bought on the black market it was often adulterated and unusable. I remember once waiting in Siliguri for a plane to Calcutta , one of the tea garden ladies returning from home leave dropping her precious Duty Free bag, and the scent of Chanel and Dior somehow absorbing her sobs . Tea gardener's wives only went on leave every four years. For her, it was a tragedy.

Mum's driver George was a bit of a rogue. We all knew it but Mum having given her affection could  see no wrong, He had run off with my darling Joe's Rosie and for months we all held our breath but Joe was a good man, he took his son and never spoke to,or of, either of them again, He operated a very lucrative money lending business - when we lived in Alipore Estates Abdul and I would hide behind a car and watch as the durwans, sweepers, bearers and ayahs queued to make their payments. Mum of course refused to accept it - "simply helping them dear, he is a very kind man",

This "very kind man" also arranged for us to hire an Ambassador to drive to Puri in - he neglected to mention it was one of his fleet of six cars that were hired for wedding and grand occasions. But to his credit, when the Naxalite Buddhist cook tried to arrange some dire misfortune, George stepped in and all was well,

He was very partial to a drink - holidays in Puri involved much mirth at the sight of George unshaven, in a lungi, straw hat and dark glasses when he made his infrequent forays into the harsh daylight.

Like most people in Calcutta he was constantly involved in litigation of one form or another and had frequent mornings off to attend court, He had one of the best barristers in the city as his lawyer and seemed to comfortably win most cases. One day, on the way out to Tolly a strikingly handsome woman called to form the side of the road. Mum told him to go and see what she wanted. They talked for a few minutes and the woman gave him a folder of legal looking papers; "She could be his lawyer's wife", Mum whispered, "Or another floozie," snorted my sister.

George got back into the car and we drove off in anticipatory silence. Finally Mum could bear it no more, "George. Who was that woman?"

We almost went of the road as he started to laugh -"That's not a woman Mam, that's my lawyer" The silence had now become incredulous. " But she is a woman?'

"Noooo Mum! He is a hijra, both man and woman. In the daytine he is a very respected lawyer - at night he dances. When a baby is born wrong - both boy and girl, the hijras come and they sing and dance and take the baby away to raise among themselves,"

Of course this had to be investigated further so we all went to court with George the next time he was there. Alipore Courthouse and Maycombe Court are inextricably linked - I was reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' at the time and it seemed to me that I was seeing the same people and activities that Harper Lee had in faraway Alabama.

Lines of young men with ancient typewriter waited expectantly for their clients to dictate their cases, alongside them there were rows of barbers waiting to give shaves to the appellants and accused, equipped with razors that made naming them cutthroat was nowhere near an accurate description. There were paan sellers and biri wallas, the man who squeezed the sweet juice of the sugar cane from between two villainous looking cogged wheels, and through it all that most common of sounds, "Chai, guram chai!"

George went into the courthouse and we sat under a peepul tree and watched the drama of the day unfold in front of us. And then we spotted him - a small old man struggling with a heavy wooden box. We called him over and we seemed suddenly to have left this place and be in a souk in a Thousand and One Nights. Inside the box there must have been at least 50 little bottles of essential  oils alongside vials and glass bottles containing water and spirit. He was a street parfumier. We all soon smelled like the most Babyloniash of whores and were utterly enchanted with this new game.

George and the hermaphrodite lawyer (now dressed in an expensive looking suit, the only give away was slight over rouging of the cheek bones)  and they took over, The old man had lost this case and giving up his perfumes - he wanted to sell them and use the money to get home to his village. I don;t need to labour the point do I? To misquote Ms Bronte - reader we bought them.

For six months the house smelt of jasmine, lilies and roses. Never quite got the blending right and my father finally put his foot firmly down and said the perfume or him. Mum did have to think about it for at least ten seconds. A month later he went to Bangkok with a patient and bought her the most enormous bottle of Chanel 5. Yet again optimism triumphed albeit somewhat circuitously.

Millesimo

And Happy Diwali

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BFF

It was so unbelievably wonderful to hear from Gail and to be called, 'my dear little Joanna'. Gail marked to turning point in mt life - she knew about the real world beyond India and she had had a boyfriend! So glamorous to the then 12 year old me. This all took place just after Desla had painted the portrait of innocence.

You can see why he wanted to paint it when you look at the 8/9th grade class photograph. With our super short mini skirts, ironed hair and borrowed make up we stood tip top on the threshold of young
   womanhood - eager to get out there and find out destinies.

Trincas on a Sunday afternoon was the place to be - 3-7 - four hours of non stop dancing and ogling the band boys. BY now I was truly, madly deeply in the throes of the crush on Peter Yeti - he eventually went out with Lori - far right, second row. The friendship really didn't survive that .

In between all this rush to be older we were, like so many little girls, dotty about horses and would spend hours at the stables feeding them carrots and  taking our lessons at the ungodly hour of  6 o'clock. Gail was a natural horsewoman and soon moved away from me and the beginners.

We became involved with the Alford brothers - two successful and Ivan who could not help but always to try and find the angle that would make him money - he eventually married Peter Yeti's sister Jean and really did live happily ever after. The there was Richard Haslem - Gail's fella.  It was also very innocent but our parents found that hard to believe - so we were grounded. But we were still allowed to sleepover at one another houses.

Before

We climbed the drainpipe at Lori's by knotting sheets together - Enid Blyton had her uses-  unscrewed the bars at Gail's. bathroom window and managed to wake the cockerel and the Durwan on our return in the dawn's early light t. I had been kissed/mauled for most of the evening and ended up with a beesting pout and several love bites. My mother said very little other to than to box my ears and then take me to the hairdresser where she said, "Cut if all off,". I cried but to no avail  and my hippy street cred soon lay about me as did my dreams.

A Puri Holiday where Gail and I slept under the stars and let the sea lull us to sleep

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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.