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

Famous Blue Raincoat

It's four in the morning....

You know that insomnia is one of things we all think we get from time to time when we have a few nights of bad sleep. The real thing is insidious - it marks itself as a kind of frenetic night time energy where the brain keeps going rather like one is on speed. You are tired but there is no gentle lulling to sleep, no snuggling beneath the covers, venting that deep breath before sleep so blissfully comes. Instead you lie there - stiff - feeling every lump in the mattress, cursing every street light. Or, if you are me, you give into it and write or play Farmville or watch The West Wing for the 20th time.

It wasn't always thus; I remember a time when sleep and I were good friends. Night time and bed time were to be looked forward to, to the passive and peaceful ravelling of the day's cares, enjoying "sore nature's bath".

To those of you still, loyally, read this - any ideas - 'cos the pills aren't working and I am so tired, so very tired. I think the four o'clock I will try hot chocolate and lying still in the dark. And pray that the insidious thoughts of failure, despair and homesickness will take a short lived holiday from my brain.

Seems to me. that it has been rather a long time since I wrote on of these - haven't had much to say really and didn't want to bore you all with all the depression stuff. Still a bit short of things to say but here goes.

When I was a small baba the world, it seemed, revolved around me. With that glorious innocence and selfishness that only the very young possess I was convinced that I lived in a universe that existed only to serve me and make me happy.

My mother saw that and wanting a well rounded child, not a possible sociopath, tried very hard to show me that there was wide world out there and many, many others also existed in it and had no idea of my small little place in the scheme of things. She took me to Shsihu Bhawan to show me Mother Theresa's orphans - children thrown onto rubbish heaps barely alive in their first wavering cries among the dung and detritus of a bustling city.

She took me to work with Father Andrew with sone the of drug addicts at his house out at Dum Dum. She opened my eyes to another world and for all the blunting of emotions that living in Calcutta can give you over time she taught me to see beyond the world of Chowrighee and Park St.

Calcutta was a very poor city - a place where people lived cheek by jowl with gut wrenching poverty and disease and it was there for all to see - played on the stage of the city streets. We all learned to live with it - to become blind to the pot bellied malnourished children, the stick thin rikshaw wallahs coughing their tubercular coughs as they pulled us from the New Market to Park St,

It struck me as I started to write this that some of you have thought that my love affair with my city is somehow myopic .... but no, I saw, I felt the pain and I still do.

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.