Side by Side

Sunday morning, we are sitting in a cafe staring at breakfast (black coffee, fruit-and-muesli, eggs) - when someone outside stops the traffic and three trucks pass by, to loud jumbled up percussion. The trucks contain people: crowds of them crammed together in ceremonial whites - and I look up for a moment then just keep crunching my granola, half asleep.

What?

This is when I am having the following thought: here, now, everything is normal to me. It is the only possible world.. A year ago today, in Pakistan, things were also normal, no: more than normal: they were only way they could be.

But put the two worlds together and you see how barmy the whole lot truly is - well, let's! Why not? What can happen?

In Pakistan, the third day of Eid: the slaughter of sacrificial animals continues.  Placid goats tethered to trees, panicked bleating from the back yard, blood in the dust.

Bali:  muesli with coconut shavings and tropical fruit. Three yoga teachers having breakfast, two women and a man. They wear sun-faded, minimal clothing and talk about their parents’ new lovers. They sit in a half-lotus position and use words like 'chakra', 'spiritual' and ‘being in a good place'. The man has long hair, a ponytail, sand in his beard.

In my deranged morning moment, I kidnap them from their green-gloop power smoothies and beam them to a courtyard in the Punjab, which is after all under the same relentless sun. There I dump them in a gathering of bearded men sweating in their shalwar kameez. Goats, a cow, a camel even, are held to the ground, an imam is praying over their heaving flanks. Long knives catch the sunlight and burn into flesh.

Is that the beasts screaming, or the yoga teachers?

The Guardian

There must be lots of them around, we see them occasionally darting across the walls. In fact, they replace the three garish pictures quite beautifully (the ones that came with the house and we couldn't bear; the ones we grabbed and stashed behind the wall) - well now instead we have a perpetually-changing gecko mosaic - much better. Call it 'Geckorama'.

Kira and I agreed that we are not afraid. There are much, much worse, unmentionable critters (shhh...  cockroaches, especially the flying ones).  No, geckos we like, especially since they will eat any of the unmentionable others.

Sometimes they hunt and when they do we turn off the TV and watch THEM instead. We saw a little guy take out a dozy wasp twice its size. It leapt and got it mid-air and dragged it under the TV table. I would love to say that fierce buzzing was followed by crunching sounds but no, we heard nothing. We just sat there in eerie silence, pointing at each other and the dark undertable.

Then there are the noisy ones I was telling you about earlier, the ones that use the family lamps for their propaganda.

And finally there is the Big One, the one we know as The Guardian. He can be found in the highest corner, under the roof - but only at nightfall. There he sits, and here I sit, looking up but not quite underneath; if he falls - which I know he won't! unless we consider a monumental paw-glue collapse, or paw-er failure - I wouldn't want him to plop onto my head.

So, where was I? Yes, we sit together companionably, with me telling him stuff and him doing that statue thing, those eyes wide and alert, that make me think Either he knows exactly what I'm on about Or he's wondering if he can stretch his jaw enough to swallow my head.

Except two nights ago, when - after some wind and black clouds and rising pressure and rustlings in the rice field - a booming rain pummeled the ground. And guess who scuttled indoors straight away, to hide behind the curtain?

Wimp.

A Scarecrow Soliloqui

Bali scarecrows, what can I say? A parallel nation of plastic and cloth, garish and divine. Perched high above a sea of green they rule, they raise a finger at the wingful sky. An army of avatars, almost-alive, almost-a-lie.

They flap their sleeves and make me shout 'PAGI, PAGI!' as I run by, on my more myopic mornings, dragging school bags, trailed by one barking dog and three calves even more confused than me.

Raising the pulse of the entire winged population with some Darth Vader head gear, are we? Magnificent, I say, although, although....

I'm yet to see. The Greatest. The Scariest. Scarecrow. Of All.

Simple in appearance. Little white T-shirt, no hat. And yet, look at the patch in his care. Birds, bugs? Not a flutter. Grain won't grow. Look how those sun rays only touch the edges. And see that stream turn the corner and slink away.

Bridges

I've been sitting here for a while now, blank day, blank screen. Alastair and the previous blog still on my mind. Some words are harder to follow, with anything - more words, images, games. So what will I write about? Life outside, frantic as always.

I bought too many limes and now they grow old and hard in the fridge. I discovered mango wraps, dragon fruit and some people with too much time on their hands. Two of these are yummy, one is hot pink and one is, alas, unavoidable.

I walked through rice paddies to a bamboo village and there were whispers and rummagings in the green stalks left and right that said 'One wrong step and I'm waiting, love from large lizard / venomous snake / nameless nasty / monster in your head'.

I learned that there is a species called 'third culture kid', and our kids might qualify, but not M. or I. As if we had brainstormed, studied, schemed and then created two aliens. I've always had that feeling anyway.

All these things are bridges, really. The path is a literal bridge, in a sea of green rice. The limes span all the way from the unpalatable to the delightful. The food takes me from hunger to sleep. And the people? From peace to paroxysm, smile to sneer.

Kids? Third culture or not, the classic bridge through time.

And the noise from the building site next door - incessant hammers on metallic sheets? A bridge from the borderline reasonable (which I was, I was!) to the dementedly insane, which I am now, sitting as I do, on the floor, in the furthest corner of the house, which happens to be a bathroom, with headphones on and a towel wrapped around my head, listening to long loops of Yann Tiersen and Portuguese fado, watching the killer-wasp in the corner build its wax palace and procreate, writing strings of nonsense and then, horror of horrors, sending them into the world like hammer blows to the temple. Ke-boom.

Unday'd

I throw days out of the calendar.

I disown them,

Dis-number and dis-month them,

I will not have them change year and come around again.

March Four, March Seven,

April Twenty Seven

June Twenty One, June Twenty Three,

December Eleven.

Now Alastair has gone and

gathered his great verbs, his skylarks and Scotlands
his silver-vowelled Spain.

folded his dawns

to ride over the mist-imprisoned hill - away, beyond away.

That done,

I too dismantle
September Twenty One.

 

*

And if you really want to know

I’ll tell you ‘how’ the days you think I’ve lost 

return to me:

Minute by minute, that is how;

and memory by memory.

An entire childhood to pick from, long summer days with cousins and berries and song; my lovely Maia who smelled of lavender and quince; who told me that thing about God and I believed her even when I didn’t believe Him. Who needs the measly muscle of March Four and March Seven, beside all this and more? 

That Afrikaans rhyme Ingrid sang in the kitchen, Ingrid in her ball-gown ready for a May ball, Ingrid in her good-girl shoes standing in a queue in London to vote for Mr. Mandela. With these moments – and I have so many - I can build endless April 27s.

June 23? I don't see it. I see only Paulo perched on the roof with a pouch full of tools and red plums. Paulo taking a breaking, squinting the sun, eating a plum, plum juice on his chin and I know he is thinking Gaia, when I throw this stone in the grass below, make a tree grow.

December 11.

Does. Not. Exist.

No room for it.What is a day? 

when Dad fills the Everywhere and the Always

and hides the hourglass away.

And now, September 21, away with you too! Shoo!

Leave me with Alastair: aglow

in the Dominican sun, showing me – in Spanish and in rhyme -

How to make bread,

ride bikes, read books, chop limes,
write poetry.

Morning Bright and Broken

Walking to the end of the road this morning, carrying school bag, water bottle, a brown banana and a great, sloshing sea of sadness about that thing we heard last night. And this is what we see.

.
And it’s so vivid and joyful that I feel the need to introduce it to the other joyful and vivid thing I know. They blaze together for a while:

And this is how I find exactly where the sun lives, with sun-wife and baby suns and sun-mobile and dandelion tea:

And as I contemplate this new discovery:

 Something at the edge of my eyelid says Wooo-hooo, how about me?

We explore and are forced to conclude that commerce knows no rest or end and what they say is true, it’s a dogs’ world out there…

… and I wish I could say that we ran home, all the way - but no, we opened dazzling wings and launched ourselves into another day…

Paradust Paradise

The day started well.

The sky said: 'I am here for you. Now sit down and meditate. Remember: you are now in Bali, where people practice yoga, meditate and then meet their soul mates and fall in love. But all in good order. Stop looking for the charger. You don't need the blue shirt. In fact, empty your mind. It's goooood for youuuu'.

So sudden and surprising was this that I did. I sat down and meditated. In my case this took the form of a silent, furious fight with my own thoughts: the charger, the blue shirt, the people I need to write to and also some imaginary people that live busy, sophisticated lives inside my head, mostly adoring me. I did not get up. I sat there contemplating this inner buzz and traffic with some bewilderment. No wonder I'm so exhausted by 10 am.

By 10am: the neighbour had decided to knock down a wall standing inches from our house. Two scrawny characters were perched on my wall with sledgehammers. Our gardener couldn't keep up: the moment he'd spruced up one of those glossy, wide-leaved plants, they were back under thick layers of cement dust. It was like trying to remove snowflakes from a football field in a blizzard.

Not finished: besides his building initiative the neighbour appeared to have organised a cremation. I became aware of it when black ash started to fall gently on my computer, shoulders and eye lashes, mixed as I was saying with all that cement powder and in soothing rhythm with the sledge hammers. I don't think I could have missed it: in minutes I was blinded, blackened, smoked and choked.

I stumbled to the gate and ran. To the car, grab the keys, to the car. Coughing like a 60-Marlboros-a-day. I put the windscreen wipers on, and they laboured up and down, pushing about hillocks of ash and dust. As I drove away I thought of Pompeii.