Today is the day for Roxy Music

Only brothers and sisters, parents and children, and a few couples spend longer in each others lives. Jane and I first met in our initial weeks at University, we became friends and later flat mates: 6 girls together  - where are you all now? - Gill, Jeanette, Dina, Audrey, Jane and Sheila, What fun! What times! What parties! What memories!  Photos from that time are rare – few cameras, no mobile phones, – and the few photos I have are packed away in storage back in the UK, but so many scenes are locked inside our heads, there to remain in a pre facebook state. Thank goodness, I hear you say!
Little did I realise in my 20s that our friendship would survive me pinching two of Jane’s boyfriends (not as bad as it sounds, we  found we didn’t have the same taste in men), all the usual ups and downs of life, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, holidays, and a few extra ‘curved balls’ that were flung our ways.  It would see us through the good times, the bad and the plain indifferent. Every time we’d meet up it would always be the same, chatting about this, that and the other, people we knew, ourselves, men, our gardens, our houses, our lives, books, clothes, music, the world, politics, religion: you name it Jane could talk about it.  As those curved balls became more serious and more intense, Jane’s character shone through at its best, ever the optimist, always positive and determined, never giving up, forever strong. Jane, I am proud to have known you and called you my friend.  And now, what else but some Roxy……….

Photo reproduced courtesy of Nico Hamilton

‘the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser’

part of my series on Indian Literature
One cannot really come to India and not read its literature. And one cannot say one has read its literature without reading Rabindranath Tagore, for that would be like visiting England without seeing a Shakespeare play, without reading Dickens; travelling to Scotland without reading the poetry of Robert Burns, or the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson or Sir Walter Scott.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, the first Asian author to do  so. He was primarily a poet, although he also wrote essays, short stories, novels, plays, musical dramas, and painted. Perhaps his most well known works are Gitanjali  / Song Offerings (1910), The Gardener (1913), The Fugitive (1921) and Ghare-Baire / The Home and the World, (1916)  which was probably the only one I had ever heard of prior to researching Indian literature. He wrote in Bengali, so I must read him in translation and that, as I understand it, is plagued by lack of correspondence between his Bengali original volumes and the English translations. Infuriating, but that’s the situation.  Now his work is readily available on the web, and English translations are available at Project Gutenberg.
 
 
 
So this week I made a start on Tagore. I’d downloaded a few of his works from Project Gutenberg before I came to India  but hadn’t really looked at them until now. I sat down on Boxing Day over a cup of tea to peruse them with a view to selecting something to read once I had finished the novel which is currently underway.  Wow!  Just 30 minutes spent dipping in and I am blown away.  Even on reading just a few pages, I am immediately struck by the level of emotion in his work (he writes from the heart) and his incredible use of language ( he is a painter with words) and I am reminded of the work of Pablo Neruda . 
Here is the opening poem of his collection The Crescent Moon
THE HOME

I paced alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.
The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.
Suddenly a boy's shrill voice rose into the sky.  He traversed the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush of the evening.
His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoa-nut and the dark green jack-fruit trees.
I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers' hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world.

If I had a set of paint brushes I feel I could paint this scene, it is so real. Have you ever read something as beautiful as ‘the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser’ ? You can see it can’t you? That colourful ball being squeezed on the horizon, the sky holding onto the last drop of colour before the black of night.
Or ‘leaving the track of his song across the hush of the evening’ You can hear the boy’s shout shatter the silent solitude of the stroll, stopping him in his tracks to see the ‘countless homes’ of the village ‘beyond the sugar-cane field’

Nora Batty meets Quasimodo!

I thought I had found the perfect answer to cold feet in a country where one takes ones shoes off at every house,shop, office, temple door and walks on freezing cold marble, and where shoes means flip flops (thongs to my Antipodean friends), namely socks with toes. Having consigned one of few pairs of socks I possess here to the waste bin after I visited the Rat Temple at Bikaner (but more of that later), I needed to find a replacement. My friendly ladies outfitters had only one type of sock, puice coloured pink (no choice)  in either nylon (no thanks!) or cotton (yes, please) at 35 or 40 Rupees respectively. Two pairs were purchased and on arriving home, washing my feet I put them on, or attempted to. Clearly they are not made for western feet misshaped by 50plus years of wearing shoes !  Nor for the musculature of my calves as I can only just get them over my ankles :)  The result looks like a cross between Nora Batty(*) and a Quasimodo glove puppet! So maybe in 2011 life will deliver me a Compo (*) x Esmeralda !
(*) Hint: For non BBC TV watchers, check out the characters in the series Last of Summer Wine