Wendy's Out of Station

I Can’t Keep Quiet

Soundtrack: MILCK Quiet

Had a crisis of confidence this morning. Is the India of my hopes and expectations a place only of my imagining? It looks so different out the hotel window. Am I indulging in some white colonial fantasy even thinking of coming to live here? What right do I have to speak? Should I shut up, go home, stay in my place. Could I do that?

But no one knows me no one ever will
if I don’t say something, if I just lie still

Since the global Women’s marches last week I’ve been listening to MILCK Quiet. A song written about finding the confidence to talk about mental illness. A song performed in Washington proclaiming that Women cannot keep quiet when politics abuses. It’s an anthem for anyone who has ever doubted their right to exist, their right to use the planet’s oxygen to speak, to breathe.

Can I keep quiet about what I’ve learned, seen? Should I? Could I?

Maybe it’s time I left my 4.5 star luxury and went out to find the India I love, to find my smile. To find my muse, Karthik’s daughter, and Kali with her sisters.

Febuary 2014
There is a Castle on a Cloud

There is a bookmark on my pillow this evening… “All that we are is a result of what we have thought.”

Today we reached Chennai, last stop on this three week temple tour. I’m in 6 star luxury high up in the sky feeling like the Queen of Sheba (no glass floor or hairy cloven foot, thank you Miss B) and I’m a little sanguine.

I get very close to India each trip, and the occasional luxuries I allow myself become more incongruous each time. We’ve talked about change and India in the IT age is different but it’s not the India I love and seek. The ordinary people I come here to encounter, Malar and Yoda, the people in the villages and temples and markets, they would never see inside a place like this. And from here I cannot hear their voices. After 3 weeks in their world the pretension here chafes.

Today as I ate a 2500 rupee ($45) lunch in splendid isolation, Karthik waited in the car outside the hotel. On the road he lives on a 500 rupee per day allowance. I used the words of Monty Python on Facebook: “Luxury! We had box in middle of road!” He has a car by the side of the road, and even that is not his.

At 3pm Karthik collected me for our afternoon walk (I took him the fruit bowl from my hotel room to ease my conscience) and we went to the beach. Just walking and watching for a couple of hours outside my golden handcuffs… come, walk with us:

There are breakers crashing on a long white beach, the air pregnant with salt and spray. The sun lowering in the sky creates long shadows, we slide away from profane time through the shimmering mists to another between world.

Let the salty mist cloud your harsh vision and tint your dark glasses. Stop looking at the rubbish and poverty. See the human not the beggar. Slide out of knowing on a beach on the edge of time. Feel with your soul.

Not in my castle on a cloud

Through the mists the hotels to the south flatten into a single silhouette turreted by a/c towers and elevator blocks. The radar post looms a high watchtower over the mists. Sand castles guarding, watching the sea.

What horrors they watched on 26 December 2004 as tsunami ripped this beach clean… on the feast of Stephen, when the sand lay round about, deep and crisp and even, uncountable beggars and slums washed away.

For millennia we have been drawn to the edges, to the deep, above the waves, beyond these shores. Into the unknown. Here we pause out of time. In the interstices, the beginnings of life.

I feel safer out here with Karthik than in the locked hotel with its security gates and guns.

Stay out of time with us: boys ride bareback on horses along the beach, gallant knights their sand castles fallen into the sea. Off to find a princess or a kingdom to save. The shell seller blows his conch, troubadour echoing a haunting call across ages, percussion by the thump of the waves. There is a castle on a cloud.

The fairy floss seller a splash of color. Madam madam, Karthik gives a few rupees to a small girl begging with a monkey. Is he thinking of his own little daughter?

Rubbish and crows. Wind all wind. Coconut shells tangled in red cloth, “From cremation” Karthik says. People put the ashes in a mud pot, inside a coconut shell. Wrap it in red cloth and cast it into the sea. Fly, be free… I like that.

Walkers make their way around colored fishing boats pulled high onto the sand. Nets formed in tidy piles like a thousand tumbleweeds frozen in the moment. Men sit and talk, repairing nets by hand. Stand on the sand cliff between the boats and lean into the wind. Embrace the spray. Timeless, safe, at home on the shore, the space between. On one side a road of cars and motorbikes and took tooks race, humanity seethes. On the other the sea roads take massive container ships stately plying the eastern ocean, waves crash and propellers drive. Both made Other in the spray filled mists. Stand safe in the space between, be the liminal. Lift your arms into the wind, for 20 rupees hold a balloon above your head and fly.

Drink the spray. Inhale the timelessness. Stalls and chairs available for the serious moneyed consumer. But drink time not cola. Breathe.

We perch on the side of a small fishing boat. No more than 5 logs lashed together. Laughing as our weight tips it over and us off onto the sand. We sit. Silent. Different worlds, separate, souls touching. Alive.

The sun breaks through a hole in the sky, spotlights girls dancing along the edge of the waves, sari ends like froth on the waves.

Breathe. A chai wallah walks past. Then ice cream wallah. Coconuts and driftwood litter the beach. Even the rubbish glistens in piles on the sand.

Walk, walk with wind in your face, sun on your back. Walk north. Walk.

The inland flattened hotel castle-scrapers are replaced, now behind the cars and busses and haste are crazy, voluptuous, ice-cream shaped exotica of silhouetted Victorian British architecture, the railway station and university. More continuous motion frozen out of our still silent space. Their world of knowledge, progress and speed. Here all is timeless and without form, slipping in and out pulsing with the waves, adrift on the spray.

A group of fully clad swimmers laughing and giggling full of joy and salt. Splashing at play. Beach cricket on the edge of the world. “Water is very wet” says Karthik.

Wind blows away words. Wind and tide and time. Shadows lengthen. Long shadows. Walk, walk. Time to turn madam. Which way? Follow the tractor tracks back to the real world. What is real? What is dream? What is in between? He is my guide, and nothing will ever be the same.

I know a place where no one’s lost,
I know a place where no one cries,
Crying at all is not allowed.
Not in my castle on a cloud.

Though I feel inadequate,
my heart not big enough for the love, the pain,
the hope…

I can’t keep quiet, for anyone, not anymore

Feeling odd – from Hyderabad to home

Soundtrack Leonard Cohen, Suzanne

1130… 2017
It’s Republic Day here at home, Australia Day there at home. I’m going home to Mumbai to my second favourite city in the world. I feel odd, shakey inside. Colonised. Coloniser. Post-colonial.

I just finished packing, looked out the hotel window. A poor man is washing trousers in a muddy puddle on a construction site. It’s the same image I saw on my first morning, on my first trip to Mumbai in 2001. Refugee women cooking breakfast on rubbish fires, washing clothes in muddy puddles on a construction site. It is India. Progress, change, the same.

Today I feel lost inside.

I was born on the land of the Kulin nation
I grew up on Wurundjeri land
Today I live on the land of the Turrbul people
My ancestors were English and Scottish
I am Australian, my soul Indian
Today I journey, always coming home.

What to say. Where to look. Who to be. Human? Woman? Anthropologist? Ex-engineer? Just me? Who is that?

On the way out last night, the Uber GPS said, “You will arrive at 2015.” Time travel or taxi?

I guess the only way to find out is to go. Journey home. Always coming home. Home is where the heart is… right?

And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there

November 2006
Hard to imaging that I didn’t even want to come to India when my first work trip came up more than four years ago – five years ago, wow time flies. I raised a sardonic eyebrow when a friend offered the advice: “You like people. There are lots of people in India. You’ll be fine.”

But fine I was, WOW, more than fine. Come with me a moment, I will get back to this trip I promise, but if you’re going to have any chance of understanding how I feel about India you need to go with me on this – did you ever read Pookie books when you were a kid? You know about the little white rabbit with wings? Well, I have these memories of sitting up in bed with Mum reading me the adventures of Pookie. She bought me all of them. He was a little lost rabbit, different, who found home and belonging on arriving in the Gypsy night market full of incredible sights and smells too foreign and wondrous to imagine.

So there I was, 2001, starry eyed like Pookie in the back of a black Ambassador taxi inching out of Mumbai airport into a full on Indian traffic jam. Back then direct flights from Australia landed after 10pm. And it was also Ganesha’s Birthday, a festival that is just huge in Mumbai. Imagine Pookie’s lights, a million little pixie lights strung over stalls made for the festival, twisted around barrows selling food of unknown tastes and ingredients, with awesome smells. Everywhere women selling garlands of flowers. Fresh coconuts split for juice, sugar cane squeezed to make some sweet elixir, later advised by my local friend to be too hygienically dodgy for me drink. Glass cabinets of fried samosas of a million different varieties. Amazing exotic flowers festooning multicoloured smoke filled entrance ways, beckoning, offering passage to new worlds where mysterious temples are inhabited by brightly lit, smiling, blue idols. And everywhere incense and smoke from small fires. People rushing in and out between the traffic, cars ignoring lane markings – are there lane markings? I laugh, unable to wipe the grin off my face. Horns are blaring, head lights flashing all in a relentless press to get somewhere. Children laughing, calling, running out, adults carrying impossibly balanced loads over miniature foot bridges before disappearing into shanty towns shrouded in mystery and smoke. Everywhere full of people and laughter and magic lights. So much pulsing life.

And I sat hypnotised in the back of my taxi inhaling the scent and wonder. Like Pookie, uniquely at home. Somehow belonging.

Waking to the next morning’s foetid reality after a pre-dawn tropical thunder storm couldn’t dampen my wonder. Naked children were playing in puddles. Those narrow foot bridges had been over open sewers foul with every kind of rubbish and excrement. Scrawny yellow dogs snapped and chased and barked. Brightly clad women squatted, cooking over rubbish fires in a squalid shanty town clinging like the torn underskirts of an ageing sari to a freeway construction site where men were already working in the dawn light, swarming like a million ants. Squalid, dirty, raw poverty. But shining with the pride and beauty of the human spirit. I felt truly at home and that feeling hasn’t changed.

On arriving this time I simply passed through Mumbai on my way down to God’s own Country and, perhaps foolishly, I economised on an airport hotel. That economy meant the hotel was “functional” at best and that I only slept courtesy of the airline earplugs I had stuffed in my bag. I should say immediately that I still slept with a smile – in fact I don’t regret it at all. Peaking between the dusty hotel curtains before bed to see where all the noise was coming from showed, even through the filthy glass, that five floors below traffic is still snaking down the same main road into Mumbai along which my taxi crawled five years ago, and it’s still gridlocked in one continuous traffic jam, even at midnight. The look also showed that my room’s twinkling ambience is courtesy of the top floor of my hotel being festooned with constellations of a million pixie lights. Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look amid the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they wil lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds her mirror

2215… 2017
I’m back in the familiar Marine Plaza Hotel in a subtly shifted Mumbai. So much has changed, so much is still the same. The drive was much faster, more prosaic, even with the engineering feat that is the new Rajiv Gandhi Sea Link. But Haji Ali Mosque is still at the end of its causeway, all lit up and floating. And the Tower of Silence is still there, looming above the unsilent. I always used to have tomato soup and a club sandwich when I arrived here, going native with the vegetarian tandoori sticks tonight!

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that you will trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

Happy in Hyderabad

I’m meant to be resting before going out for tea, but I wanted to share this with you first and of course it’s taken all my rest time. Anyway, after a brilliant day Monday teaching at the University, and yesterday chatting and getting a sinus infection, today we risked an outside trip. Ended up at Chilkur Balaji Temple, well outside it anyway, we were having too much fun to go inside. We wandered, and chatted, and ate guava. I’ve never been brave enough to try sugar cane juice. I learned how to ask people in Hindi if I could take their photographs, and practised a lot. The best smiles were after I’d taken the photos and turned my phone around so they could see themselves.

I asked this guy if I could take his photo, and he wanted me to take the young fellow too. Not that I understood his reply. Which makes me think of this morning, there’s a deaf waiter at my hotel, huge grin. Well this morning I made sure I remembered how to sign You R Great! He’s now my new best friend.

This woman is so beautiful with her guava and her mango, only 10 rupees each. Just lovely, well not the guava, I’m not a fan.

The goats didn’t all try to run away. And no we didn’t feed them my guava.

That’s it, quick rest now before dinner. See you!

Blessed in Bangalore

As I said, this is a trip of firsts for me, and my trip to Bangalore was the first time I’ve been invited to stay in a family home. A family home with four dogs and three cats was also a first! I felt totally at home the whole time – thank you.

I did spend a lot of time around the house relaxing, talking, feeling so welcome and loved. Even Toffee the cat loved me, although he mostly wanted to eat my feet. We ate in because the lady who prepares the family’s meals is a wonder and the food amazing. I thought I was doing so well on the spices, but then I found out that she was making it mild for me. I would come back just for the food, and the love.

Each day I went for a walk. These photos are from my longest walk through the neighbourhood, I do so love India. Other days we walked around a local park, reclaimed from an old quarry. The park was always full of kids squealing with delight, runners, old folk walking their grandchildren. I saw one lady every day walking briskly in pastel color coordinated tracksuit sets. On our fourth passing on my last day (we walked in opposite loops), I asked her how many laps she did each day. Five to ten, she replied.

The streets nearby were green and tranquil, well appart from dodging the two-wheelers and not listening to their horns. And maybe I did a little shopping.

And finally some cows, although, there really must be a ban about plastic bags soon. Any of these lovelies eat one of those bags and they’ll die, horribly.

I was very blessed on my last day to be taken by a friend of the family to the local Hanuman temple for prayers and blessings. Very special. Very happy. Very blessed.

Of course Zorro shouldn’t be in my blog or the kitchen, but he just saunters in quietly when no one is looking!

There’s no place like home… India

India is the land of my soul, the place where I feel so at home my heart aches with joy. No, you smarty-pants people, not indigestion, it’s heart-warming joy and belonging. I know every trip is different, it was just that leaving Brisbane this time was so rushed with preparations and distractions it hardly felt like I was supposed to be enjoying myself. But when the plane tilted turning to come into Bombay Airport and I caught my first glimpse of India, well my heart soared as Mata ji, Maa Durga, mother earth goddess, welcomed me back. I was grinning like, well a lot! Couldn’t wipe the smile off my face.

When the plane touched the tarmac I realised the random selection on my phone was colluding with the universe: it was Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral that was reaching it’s enormous, brass filled crescendo in my ears, reverberating in my being. I knew I was not alone.

After a couple of hours in Mumbai meeting a dear sister-friend in person for the first time, it was into a car for the three hour drive to Pune, and the 6th National Bioethics Conference.

No the traffic hasn’t become any less traumatic, I just photographed a quiet bit!

To be honest I didn’t see too much of Pune, and not only because of the terrible pollution that shrouded everything and made breathing a chore. I spent a huge amount of time eating dhosa for breakfast, preparing for the conference, or at the conference, or getting to and from the conference in took tooks. In some ways, after 12 or so trips to India, this has been a trip of firsts. It was my first time in Pune. It’s my first time here “alone.” I’ve always been here for work or as an affluent tourist, and in both cases have had a hired a/c car and a driver. And now here I was standing on the road flagging took tooks, giving directions in my limited Hindi. When I went out of the hotel there was no uniformed Karthik (name changed) waiting for me, I just walked off into the surrounding streets to explore. Continue reading “There’s no place like home… India”

Peninsula Rose

There is no soundtrack to this post unless you choose one, but do pour yourself a glass of bubbles

This is a post that I forgot to share back in December when I was crazy busy getting ready to come to India. Cathy and I had a brilliant day with bubbles and an amazing lunch on the Mornington Peninsula, then we had a bit of a perambulate in some lovely garden areas.

Who would have thought that artichokes and garlic gone to seed could look so beautiful. Love flowers that “convention” says are passed their best – the best is yet to be.

And then we went to Flinders Beach for a walk in the drizzle and found a very large friend feeding in the sea grass. And some learner wind surfers who were caught without wind, and like ducklings had to be brought back to shore.

Laneway Life

Recently I advised a friend visiting Melbourne to take a wander through the laneways that make up so much of the quirky eating culture of this incredible city. So, since I’m here I thought I’d do the walk I recommended, getting off the tram at Federation Square opposite Flinders St Station. I do love Fed Square, thriving with people coming and going, flags flapping, all corners and nooks and crannies, but it does look a bit like Italian designer luggage that’s been around the baggage carousel one time to many. This time I didn’t go into the Ian Potter Gallery, or into the Centre for the Moving Image, both of which are amazing cultural resources. Instead I crossed over to the Young and Jackson’s corner and headed west down Flinders St. Of course Melbourne aficionados will tell you I should have gone upstairs in Young and Jacksons for a drink with Chloe, and it was about lunch-time, but well, once you’ve seen one Brazilian it’s appropriate to keep your blog PG rated.

So, down and right into Degraves St. I’ve loved it for years since it was dodgey and dirty, and a way out of Flinders St Station to avoid both crowds and rain. Used to be quite the challenge to work out how to get to work zigzagging through laneways to avoid getting wet. Now it’s the scene for street cafe’s and some pretty unique shops. Including one specialising in hand made Italian paper and ink pens. Continue reading “Laneway Life”

Melbourne Town, coz there’s no place like home

Soundtrack: Hmmm might have to think about that a bit…
ok, Dire Straits, Walk of Life

So here I am, back in Melbourne for a couple of special family birthdays, to catch up with some amazing friends, and for Christmas, so I thought I’d better show you around. The image above is of the Yarra River (the only river in Australia that used to run upside down, but it’s much cleaner these days) and the spires of the CBD. The City of Melbourne is located on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people. I was so proud to be able to buy my nephew a beautifully illustrated children’s book, produced by the Wurundjeri people called, Welcome to Country (Black Dog Books, 2016). I hope with his multi-ethnic background he can grow to be a custodian of his land, the land cared for today and over thousands of years by the Wurundjeri.

I bought the book on my first nostalgic stop at The State Library of Victoria. When I was finishing high school I used to come here to study. Truth be known it was more that in the building I felt smarter, and it seemed so grown up to be pretending to study and drinking coffee in the cafe of what was then the Museum. Today renovations have made a magnificent space for researchers and visitors alike, the light, the atmosphere, it still makes me feel more learned, more wise. You can inhale the journey of knowledge. I wished I had some Foucault or better yet, some Australian female philosopher to imbibe slowly, clearly my subconscious was thinking of Michelle Boulous Walker. But instead I sat back, breathed slowly and let the learning seep in the pores of my skin, let my mind wander up the layers of shelves to the enlightenment of the dome. Continue reading “Melbourne Town, coz there’s no place like home”

West End Girls

Well I’ve been back in Brisbane for more than 6 weeks and I promised to show you around, so here we go. Saturday morning’s in Brisbane, down by the river, crowded around a rugby field, under the old fig trees and umbrellas gathers a little utopia – West End Market. For the last couple of weeks the Jacarandas have added a uniquely Brisbane purple hue to the multicultural, sensory riot.

Soundtrack: West End Girls, The Pet Shop Boys
Sorry can’t help it, whenever I think of West End that pops into my head

We all know I love a market with plenty of berries and food, and coffee! And loads of live music to drown out thoughts of those New Romantics. Although if you want Romantic, Gypsy Vardo’s Love Potion coffee’s can’t be beaten.

It’s all good and organic, fresh from farmer to you, and plenty of pharts in those lentils if you get the wrong end of the pineapple. Continue reading “West End Girls”

The Anti-hero you need

I need to tell you quickly (because I should be writing) about a book I read yesterday – total inspiration, made me walk taller: The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith. Look I have nothing in common with the hero, Aud, other than we are women living in a world that can be really hard. I mean she’s tall, Norwegian, an ex-cop, rich, a master of martial arts. She has woodworking skills and an incredible girlfriend. She has killed, I haven’t! But like all of us she’s damaged, she’s loyal, she takes no shit or prisoners. And while I was reading that book I walked proud, believed in myself, felt less overwhelmed by life: that positive feeling has lasted into today.

Yes Aud steps outside the law, she does things that make her anti-hero not heroine, but to me that just makes her more real. There are quite a few reviews that rave about JJ, you know that new Marvel series they think is empowering and feminist (umm not in my world) and how she’s the new anti-hero that women need to aspire to be. Well Aud would be a much better tv series female anti-hero than JJ! That show annoys me – as if women get superpowers to stand up against violence! We don’t get external superpower mojo when we are oppressed, when men manipulate and control and emotionally abuse. We have to find courage in our ordinary humanity, if we can we find other women, and then we get up and keep going. Hoping for superpowers or flopping hopelessly waiting for a superpower saviour won’t save abused women. I also feel like its a show that profits from rape culture & intimate partner abuse of women. End of sermon!!

Sadly the Aud series publishers are, well odd, so in Aus only books 1 and 3 are available electronically, which means that I’ll have to wait for book 2 to arrive in paperback from distant shores. And that well known web-publisher named for incredible women, well the product description for these books is “xx” hmmm, not very helpful! Luckily my electronic goggling skills found more details and I risked “purchase now”.

While I’m waiting for the delivery person you’d thing I should get back to my writing, but luckily Nicola Griffith has also written some interesting looking sci fi and historical fiction so procrasti-reading can continue. Have a look at the Blue Place, it really is worthwhile.