Will You Dance With Me?

I must have been about 11. Mum said that we were going out for a special Sunday treat - we were going to Trincas for the jam session. I think I probably thought she meant we were going to get some jam - anyway I was underwhelmed. But - it was with Desmond and the Tibetan boys and I was promised a banana split so I acquiesced and at three o'clock we went.

How can I make you see that scene? It even now defies description. Several hundred young people on the dance floor - jammed on the dance floor. People on tables twisting - for yes, this was the time of the Twist. I think I knew in the first thirty seconds or arrival that I would never be one of the 'cool' people. This was on a whole new level. This was not my sheltered small baba life and I LOVED it!

My sister, meaning well, told everyone how good I was at doing the Twist. NO! Not here in this place. I was never going to dance in front of these people. I think buoyed up by love I ventured onto the dance floor and weakly twisted my hips in a parody of the real thing. I knew and they knew it but all oohed and aahed at my 'talent'. Then the band played Let's Twist Again and the real dancing started all over again. It was incredible, unbelievable and I lost my soul to Rock and Roll.

I had to wait nearly three years before I got back there. Going to a jam session in my own right as a person not an appendage. The same fevered atmosphere still existed although the Twist was long gone. We had to queue for an hour to get in and once in stake a claim to a table and guard it with our lives. The session ran from 3 'til 7 every Sunday afternoon. Always with live music and always the bands that we all wanted to follow. In those early days that was the Flintstones with 'my' Peter Yeti singing Mustang Sally. It was four hours of hedonistic pleasure - we danced, we talked, we cried and we laughed. For those four hours Trincas became a microcosm of the real world - all human life was there. Jealousy and anger and love all simmered and stirred in the melting pot.

I don't know when it stopped being fun - I just know that Trincas in the evening became a place to go to and Sunday afternoons belonged to off course betting on the Bombay races at the RCTC. We all needed a different stage for our dramas and, to an extent, needed to not play them out quite so publicly. We outgrew the jam session - bands like the Great Bear needed a bigger stage and being listened to not gyrated to. I still shiver when I hear Mustang Sally though.

Brief Break

The story will be continued tomorrow I promise but I felt the need for more immediate contact with you - silly I know but I was missing the one sided conversation.

Calcutta was and is a very small community - little goes on that is not public knowledge within a few hours. An example of this is when a friend of mine became pregnant - I went with her to a clinic off Elliot Rd. and waited in the waiting room while she saw the doctor then took her home.

I walked in to the sitting room at home to find my parents, white faced, clutching large whiskeys begging me to tell them the truth. The nurse at the clinic had worked for Dad once and phoned him as soon as she saw me. It took several hours to convince them it wasn't me having a baby but my friend. I never really stood a chance of being really bad - there were too may eyes watching - if they didn't have links to Mum or Dad they would almost certainly have links to Desla  or Dubs,

Despite this, or maybe because of  it I always felt entirely safe - the only bad experience I ever really had was one to be savoured for its tattered glamour.  I spotted a rather attractive young man in Trincas one night and was told that he was the young cousin the Tripura family. I wangled an introduction and was asked out to dinner.

You must understand  that we were in our own way very innocent. Jaideep, having just  returned from being educated in England was used to young women who has embraced the sexual revolution ans took their places as equals/ I still expected a car door to be held open for me.

After dinner he invited me back to the Tripura Palace in Ballygunge and showed me around an echoing ghost of a house with huge marble halls and neo classical nymphs draped coyly on plinths in alcoves. Unsurprisingly the tour ended in his rooms and the usual rough and tumble ensued. As it was getting close to midnight I asked  if he could arrange for a car to take me home.

The atmosphere changed - there were no cars - I hadn't slept with him yet - who did I think I was? We were locked in for the night. I took matters into my own hands hands ran out to the main hall and shouted for the Durwan to  go and find a taxi. The resultant noise woke the Maharani's bearer and he sat me down, made me tea and organised the taxi in what seemed like seconds. Jaideep was banished back to his room.

The old bearer saw me home and apologised for the shame of his mistress's nephew.

The postscript came when Jaideep turned up the next night and tried to bully his way past Abdul and the two dogs. Winnie, I am glad to say bit him!. I fell to Abdul to have the last word." Ek dum budmash baba!"

A Tale of Love and Obsession

Ok - enough about other people - back to ME!


This was going to be about my hopeless love for a glorious singer in a band. I though I would never be in touch with him again and therefore could write about him with impunity - shock, horror, I  think I've found him on Facebook!


Oh well, unlikely he'll accept my friend request and even more unlikely that he will ever read this as indeed unlikely as my other subject is to ever see any of this! I'm tempting fate but I do want them to get in touch.


Ok - so here's the thing. I have never been very good at relationships - if they liked me I was bored quickly, if they didn't I could pine for years! So it was with these two young men. I was also always attracted by glamour, the blessed ones, the golden ones. The absolutely and completely unobtainable ones, ever, without a doubt, they would never look at me.


You see the problem, and perhaps understand why at 55 I  have no partner or lover or very few romantic memories. Perhaps that is why I am addicted to rom coms. Who knows? This is not a please pity me blog by the way - just how it was and is. Does not mean that I was celibate, virginal or anything other than a child of the sixties. Sex was one thing - love quite another.


Let us begin this journey of tribulation. Really the first love was a third member of the group - Peter Yeti, oh could sing - to this day I cannot hear Mustang Sally without a shiver running down my spine. He was the kindest - accepting of the adoration - always letting me down gently. And, if I was sad he would sing a song his father had taught him, "Old Stewball was a Racehorse", it always made me laugh. And that is interesting because the other two really never did make laugh. I still love Peter, he was a blessed soul cursed with growing up in an environment that was hostile to his race, and cursed with a talent that here in the sixties would have made him famous - in Calcutta simply notorious.


And then there was Johnny. John Brinnand. Oh my God. He was, to me, gorgeous. He was the lead singer with a ground breaking band, the Great Bear. Ground breaking because along with Dilip Balakrishnan they wrote much of the music themselves - not just covers. Although to see him perform Brown Sugar was pure joy! They actually had a concert of simply their work, 'Seagull Empire' at one of Calcutta's largest theatres, Kala Mandir, and they pretty much sold it out. I shadow danced behind them - I was such a wannabe groupie. I adored John. Loved the rest of the band, they were friends, Dilip, Nondon Bagchi and Devdun Sen but John I loved.


The sad thing is that as I grew older we grew closer, more like friends and were, almost, lovers. My mother wondered why the bedroom door was locked! I'll say no more - use your imagination but suffice to say there was a certain shortage of clothes to be found. And that was that, he never came back and I left. I think I found him today, I hope so and I hope that we can still be friends. Suspect however, that I will get moonstruck all over again even if he is fat and balding.


The only truly romantic thing I ever did was for John. I was going to Puri and asked of he would like me to bring anything back. He said the sea.

So, I went to the bazaar and bought a brass pot, I had engraved, "For John, the sea" and then I walked down to the water and filled the pot with sand and shells and seawater. He did quite like that.


Finally there was Anguish. Angus Scott. At King Alfred's College a group of us went to Wisconsin on a one semester exchange.

The very first meeting we had in walked this very good looking young man in cricket whites. Such a cliche, and I initially thought he was arrogant and a pain.


When we got to UWEC it was a different story and for four months I think I made his life very difficult. He was younger than me and didn't get the devotion bit at all. Although, I did have to help with his washing! I think I scared him but we became such good friends. Had such adventures - I went camping in Voyageurs National Park with him and my darling friend Jon. 

Real camping, tent, fire, wet ground and a chemical toilet. Not me at all.But did I complain, not on your nellie. I wouldn't have dared.


Odd thing - and you my solitary reader can let me if you think it is too - I phoned him just after I got home, he left a couple of days after me, and he said that he had been walking up to the shops listening to "Who's Gonna Drive You Home" and it had made him think of me and he felt sad. I'd had never listened to it so took little notice. When I did hear it hmmmmm mind games maybe?


We stayed friends of course, I directed a production of 'The Dresser' with Angus as Sir and darling Oliver Darley as Norman. Bittersweet time - hours spent in rehearsal.

 Why does it still matter - because it does, it really, really does.


He's a reporter now - with Sky and then ITV. Occasionally he pops up with news report or the football results or, best of all, he fronted a Grand Prix one year for ITV. I still want to be ablonde and pull the cool guy. Never gonna happen.


There you go - my loves and obsessions. Am I a bunny boiler or just rather sad? Up to you...
xxx


Oh yes - and if you want know what it was really like back then click this link .

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1041002/asp/calcutta/story_3825885.asp