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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Blue days

I am having one of those horrid nights 0 you know the ones where you feel dog tired but a soon as the light goes off a million unbidden thoughts start to race around you head. Even a double dose sleeping pill hasn't worked so  I fall back to the blog.

One of the side effects of the medication is that I feel disconnected and find it hard to write which in itself raises dilemma - do I stay here and perish with that sadman or join the madmen running free (David Bowie for those of.  you too young to remember.) It is lovely to wake without that pressure of dread of another day to be endured. But, and this is a big but, that's the last real feeling I have all day.

I would welcomse feedback - answers on an email joannawatkin@yahoo.co,uk

xxxxxx

Hello again

I am finding it incredibly hard to think of what to write about - I am feeling better so have no horror stories of misery and depression to share - my mind seems to have seized up and refuses to allow me to access small baba stories and my day to day life is sooooo dull.

I can always fall back on that great British standby, the weather but feel that that would be cheating so fear not, there will be no eulogies for the sun and dappled shade of an unexpected spring.

This is a hard time of year - these weeks leading up to the anniversary of Mum's death each have a marker - last hug, last ride out in the car, last time we laughed; inexorably building to the day itself when it all floods back. This year I miss her more than before - I mind her not being here to talk to, to tell about things and to laugh with. The pain never goes away but it gradually eases to inconstant stabs of unexpected memory or loss.

I am thinking of giving up smoking!!! Shock horror! Had to light another one as soon as I wrote that but the desire is finally there - bored with the smell of tar and ash and would quite like to structure going out around the event and not the fag breaks. I'll keep you posted but don't hold your breath. I am also about to take up Pilates and Zumba and will need to breathe a little more easily. You see, I really am feeling better and starting to think there might be a future after all.

So there you are - updated. Light your candles that I might find my baba voice again soon and until then, wish me luck in the fight against the fags. And if you can, light a candle for Joy so she can see our light below her and know she is missed.

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Hiatus

Sorry it has been such a long time - the fallout from the Christmas blog continues to make itself felt and that puts certain constraints on me, or so I thought. Plus, the black dog has been heavy on my shoulder and that just makes boring 'poor me' reading.

This, sadly won't a small baba tale - bit of a blockage on those at the moment - so I thought I would write about the daily grind of trying to be better and less down. Small things make me happy these days, a tree just smudging with green, a crocus showing its glorious colour. And then big things make me sad -~ Japan, Cote d'Ivoire, any conservative politician.

I am registered to vote again so will go and make my mark - I missed out on the last election because of the move to here and felt very aggrieved - I always vote - as much for Emmeline Pankhurst as myself.

I really have very little to say to you tonight so let me leave you with a poem from my newly acquired copy of "The Great Zoo". You may remember I  wrote about it some time ago - now that I have my own copy I love it even more. I hope you do too.

THE WINDS

You cannot imagine
how these winds behaved
 last night
They were seen
eyes flashing
their tail long and rigid

Nothing ( not prayers or oaths)
could turn them
from a shack, from a lonely ship,
from a farmhouse,
from all these necessary things
that they unwittingly destroy

They were finally brought back this morning, bound
lingering lovers
caught by surprise
while wandering pensively
near a field of dahlias

(Those over there, to the left
asleep in their cages)
Nicolas Guillen

I do hope you love it as I do.

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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