The Witching Hour . Whateve

It is 3.30 in the morning and I am sitting up in bed, cross legged writing this because my brain will simply not accept that this is sleep time.I have been sitting here desperately trying to think of small baba tales to entertain you with and all that is doing is to make sleep waft gently away as smoke from a lit cigarette leaves its toxic cloud quietly above your face.

Awhile ago, when I seemed to have lost my voice for writing I saw a crappy Sunday afternoon film - one of those made for TV movies firmly rooted in the rom com genre. It had a happy ending of course but it made me cry and cry. I don't know why, maybe the protagonist's loss of both parents, maybe the death of the little girl's father. Whatever the reason I cried for two days - not subtle gentle tears that slide eloquently down the face but loud whooping tears and snot. And then I realised - I had never really cried for Mum or Dad and exhausting and terrifying as it was it was also like lancing a boil. I slept for another two days and felt as if a burden had been lifted.

To reach the sunlight when one suffers from depression is a scary thing, the black clouds are always there at your back." But oh my dears and oh my friends it is a lovely light ",as Edna St Vincent Millais would say of candle light.

It is however transient and I wish I could sit here now and say that all in the garden is roses and buttercups but it isn't. There are days when I want to die and days when all I want to do is lay down in a darkened room and stop this carousel world for a few brief moments of respite. I understand the frustrations of those of you love me - I get frustrated too and long for normality and certitude. Long to find Pollyanna again and be more like the small baba with all her confidence and love." Maybe this time..."

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.

Mountains

It was August and it was hot - very hot and very humid. The plan had been to go to Kalimpong for all of August and to get home in time for the Monsoon Race Season. Sadly this was the time that my mother and Desmond were considered spies and none of us could get permits.

We were all upset - my mother cried and we all felt anger at the injustice of it all. We had also been planning a big mountain party for Desla's birthday. Then we got a phone call to come to Minto Park for the party.

We went with bad grace - a party on the eighth floor of a block of flats overlooking Bhowanipur cemetery was not the same as Bloody Marys with aunties and a view of Kanchenjunga.

We arrived at base camp - Desla had taken his tents from the Annapurna trip and set them up in the living room. We were to cook on little camping gas stoves and drink Calcutta Bloody Marys. We sat in the tent and imagined the wind and snow whistling around us. Desmond told us stories of his hunt for the yeti and showed us the skin of a blue bear that he had been told was that of yeti. He told of how to escape the Yeti's clutches by turning your face in the opposite way that you were running and he told us that the yeti would kill men but take women to mate with.

As the night wore it grew  hotter inside the nylon tents but no one moved - it was a night of magic and wonder and only got better when the Nepalese boys brought out the drum and guitars and we started to dance. Desla surpassing us with 'Naintala'

I don't remember going home but I dreamed of yetis and mountains and how one man could so entrance us all that we felt we had returned to our beloved mountains for one night more.

Things of beauty

I was very blessed - I had an eye for beauty in all its shapes and guises for a very young age - I guess as a result of being a permanent appendage on my mother and Desmond. I went where they went, read the same books and was not so much introduced to beauty as surrounded with it in its all its physical form and metaphysical forms.

There were always beautiful people around and art and sculpture and silk. I accepted beauty as a mundanity - it was part of my childhood just as much as the bustees and refugees were.

The most beautiful man I ever saw was Lennie Dorje on a trip to Bhutan, when he arrived as we sat round a fire pi - he was dressed all in red and carried pistol at his side. ( This was only a short time since his brother Jigme had been assassinated. I was all of 9 or 10 and something inside me went WOW! His beauty was tempered be the threat of danger that surrounded him and although I was sent to bed early I know they stayed up into the night drinking and playing cards. I think you could say that glamour had entered my life and I loved it.

Tahctzung or Tiger's Nest is must see adventure if you are a visitor to Bhutan and we were duly taken part way by donkeys and climbing on foot. The monastery is high over the Pairo valley and when we visited it was a tranquil place. Desmond found an old lama whose window framed the most perfect view for meditation, a valley, mountains and a river. It was inspirational and to this day I have only to close my eyes to see it. It was beautiful.

I suppose I was about 14 when the penny dropped that I was not beautiful, at least not on the outside - it was hard for awhile but I tried to beautiful on the inside to make up for it. I suppose that was when I realised that I had been given a great gift; not being beautiful myself I could treasure it in others. I'll tonight with a little Leonard Cohen at the Chelsea Hotel - both he and Janis Joplin forgot their beauty was in there music, their voices and their poetry of song.

Fashion icon?

There were two women's charitable organisations in Calcutta that produced exquisite needle work. They had been set up to provide women with work that they could do and still continue their normal day to day life. They were the Good Companions and the Women's Friendly Society. Every Christmas I would be given satin slippers embroidered with pink rosebuds and a matching tissue box. My mother would get a jewellery roll -you get the picture.

Good Companions had a doll hospital hidden behind a swing door - ~i imagined the dolls lying in their dolly beds waiting for the doll doctor to come and make them better - fixing an errant eye, realigning a rickety head or sewing up a sagging teddy. It was a terrible shock when I got older and realised that the toys were just placed on a shelf in the stockroom and to wait their turn.

The Women's Friendly specialised in the most beautiful party dresses and every year I was primped and pricked in order to walk down the catwalk at Tolly and show off one or two of the dresses. I did not enjoy this - the petticoats prickled and the elastic on my little ballet pumps was always too tight. But my mother always made me do it and made me feel as if I had a starring role. I would walk to the end of the runway, curtsy to the British High Commissioner's wife and then walk slowly back. And yes - she always bought the dresses for me to wear to parties. My cousin Sarah still had one sent back to England for her to wear to show off at parties here. I believe her own little girl had worn it too.

If you think about it these were revolutionary 'good works'. Committees formed by women for the betterment and advancement of women and all done in the fifties and sixties - I think Good Companions predated WW2. Friendly societies were the backbone of the early trade unionists and yet all this was being done by the memsahibs who would have been horrified at the idea they were spreading the germ of feminism. But they were.

Even better than that they gave me a chance to be, albeit briefly, a style icon on the catwalk. Sadly my modelling career floundered when I got to be seven and refused point black to ushered into any more of those frivolous, beautiful, exquisite frocks.

Comfort

There is a great deal to be said for being comfortable - easy on the ageing bone structure, relaxation and a general sense of well being but... There is physical comfort; the soft sofa or bed, the heating turned up to a cosy warmth, the taste of the first coffee of the morning. There is economic comfort - having enough money to do the day to day things you want with a little left over for the impulse buy.

And then there is spiritual comfort, the comfort of another's presence, the calm of pure faith that gives comfort in times alone. When asked if she was in pain at the end of her days my mother would only say that she was uncomfortable - I took her word for it and thought she suffered little - it was only when the morphine appeared that I realised her discomfort was agony and by then it was too late to offer her the moral comfort I should have given her before.

That is the trouble with English - we have so many words that have multiple meanings, and within those meanings so many nuances and degrees  of meaning that we lose our sensitivity to certain words.

Comfort for me is a hug, warmth and an absence of stress. For others it may be many different things, their own home, their relationship or even simply the day to day mundanity that reassures.

We seek out comfort, long for it and treasure it when we find it - even a soft sofa can bring joy and comfort and as Christmas approaches and we hear the words of the carol "tidings of comfort and joy" we realise that our 21st century comfort has an ancestry that is old as mankind. We all seek that comfort and joy in our lives. I hope we all have some chance of finding it.

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