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Monthly Archives: February 2015

#38 On the way to The Golden Temple. The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

21 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in Uncategorized

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On the way to the Golden Temple.

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The only direct bus to Amritsar left at 3.30 in the morning. You would think at that unholy hour Indians might abandon their ‘scrummage queuing’ but no chance, ‘scrummage queuing’ in India never sleeps. (That was never bestowed by The Empire.) The chaos theory of Brownian motion that sublimates into physical pushing and shoving and baggage being tossed onto the roof encouraged The Boy to want to sit up there, like an extra from an E M Forster novel. Sitting atop of fast moving public transport is now banned, and The Boy had to sit on a dry seat in the innards.

Mrs Bhandhari’s Guest House, an old colonial building in the Army admin sector was a beautiful place to ferment, large verdant gardens and a swimming pool. The kids when they were not dipping in the pool wandered around the gardens like a couple of young Gerald Durrell’s pointing at lizards, allowing me to make up fictitious names for them, such as, the Lesser Spotted Bhandhari Ridge Back, quite common there.

Amritsar is a fascinating city. The obvious attraction is The Golden Temple, which is worth a deviation. It is part of our heritage, as I will come to later. Directly next to The Temple are the gardens where The Amritsar Massacre took place in 1909, when General Reginald Dyer opened fire on peaceful protestors killing between 379-1,000 people, and as many wounded. The bullet holes are still in the wall, picture framed in red wood. It is a scene I had watched with horror many years before in the film: Ghandi, and to see the bullet holes and the well where people tried to jump down to escape the onslaught is quite moving, for me anyway, not for the children. Who soon became bored with their history lesson and wanted something cold to consume.

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 The Golden Temple feels like it is part of my legacy as The Wife is from a Sikh lineage, and every house we visit on her side of the family has picture on prominent display. This is the children’s heritage, even though they are disconnected from it most of the time. It was one of the arguments we had used to swing the year off with their schools: a heritage holiday! A walk around the pool and a gaze in the Temple does bestow a meditative miasma. I was asked to carry the holy book (Guru Granth Sahib) at the end of the day, but that would have been too hypocritical.

That was not the main reason we were in Amritsar, we were there to pick up The Wife’s mother, who is called Nani-Gee by everyone that is younger than her. I called her by her first name once and she nearly burst with laughter, and the look my spouse gave me suggested I shouldn’t risk a second utterance, ‘you just don’t, that’s why.’ Nani speaks next to no English and my Punjabi is woeful, so there was no debate. I know enough Punjabi to know all the swear words in Punjabi (and Urdu) and when the North Indians are talking about the ‘White Man’ in a negative way.

In one school I worked in, a Pakistani pupil was bravely, and quite foolishly abusing a P.E. teacher in Urdu as I entered the changing rooms. “Ah Mr Pindar, you speak Urdu, what’s he saying to me.” “Well, he is suggesting you’re a penis, and that you have sex with your sister and mother.” The P.E. teacher did not find it as amusing as me, and after the translation, neither did the pupil. In the same school as term of both endearment and ridicule some pupils would call me, Mr Pindu. A Pindu is a simpleton or village idiot, I took it as a term of endearment.

By this stage we are three weeks into our jaunt, and it feels like we have been away months. The mother-in-law arriving and being surrounded by a lot of Sikhs feels like home to all of us. The warm glow of pride as Nani-Gee shows us around The Golden Temple explaining some of the rituals and having langar (free to all communal food, Langar literally translated means kitchen in Punjabi.) It is not only great for us the adults, but the kids as well; seeing their roots, even though they would never class themselves as half Indian, unless there was some gain from it.

There is also another feeling that hangs over me, and it is one of my Empire roots, that most of us have to shoulder if we are white/British, and honest, and it does not sit too well. I would have been better off not visiting the Memorial Gardens and seeing the negative legacy that a few thousand people ruling over millions upon millions of the indigenous populace. Of course you can argue there are some positives to The Empire, but once you move beyond sport, architecture, transport and organisation it is hard to find many. In fact it is best to adopt an ostrich position and bury your head in the sand, that way you might not hear the native people of North America, Australia and Africa wanting to have quick word! Maybe we should let it go, it was a few decades ago and we have The Commonwealth Games to make amends. The Gardens were not the only place I felt white-man guilt while I was away, but it was the first. Maybe I should get over it, the ones that profiteered the most seem to have, but it is not an option to bypass these reminders, it is a compulsion, and as a consequence our children are educated, not just into the selective, but the essential… and we move onwards, ever onwards.

Next week: Zipping up my boots, going back to my wife’s roots, yeah.

’50 Mistakes of the Fledgling Fiction Writer’ now appears weekly in the Huffington Post. This week’s is the very first one: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/ian-m…

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

Ian M Pindar writes books, and also about himself in the third person sometimes, so it looks as though he has a huge team of dedicated professionals working around the clock. His latest book is in fact a novella and has the strange title of: ‘Foot-sex of the Mind’. It is not a Mills and Boon, but about finding out what is important in life far too late. It will take you four hours to read, or about the time it takes to get around The Memorial Gardens and The Golden Temple.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

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#37 The Curious Incident of the Gap in the Year. The bimonthly travails through life; sometimes avoiding the pointing fingers and arrows of outrageous fortune.

06 Friday Feb 2015

Posted by thewritingimp in children, gap year, travel, writing

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McLeod Ganj: The Lama’s home, naughty monks and the end of the rain brings puberty.

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Just a few years ago we gave up our jobs, seized the kids out of school, and exited left around the world for a year.

The Tibetan Buddhist enclave that is ‘in the cloud-ganga’ (there is ‘weed’ growing everywhere), was a big turning point in our year away. That was the juncture where we all exhaled, the same as when you go on a summer holiday and it takes you a few days to acclimatise, get your bearings and just relax into it; easier for us, the grown-ups; having travelled several times before; the children now happier, excitable. My daughter skipping about, eight at this stage, my son scouring the guide book for things to do. We had a simple rule when we stayed anywhere, everybody picked one thing they wanted to do, and we had to make time to do it: family democracy without the need of a voting system.

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The place could have that cathartic effect, surrounded by monks and people that want to associate with monks, maybe that’s why the Israelis were there? The rainy season seemed to end while we were here (not a metaphor), not before one last deluge. We were staying only three hundred yards from the centre, up a steep incline. The family unit had all gone off to eat, I was meeting them later at the tiny local cinema to watch ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’, as I had been stuck down with what is never called anything but ‘the trots’ by my parents. My trotting was of a dressage nature the short distance to the toilet, but I wouldn’t have won any medals even with ribbons in my hair. Then it rained, like several dams bursting. Taxis couldn’t get up to the apartment due to a fallen tree so I risked it. I laughably had a brolly–little more than an ornament for the deluge to bully. Like a biblical scene the road turned into a river up to my ankles in just seconds, and by the time I had reached the cinema I was super-saturated. We plonked ourselves down at the very front of the thirty-seater auditorium, which looked as though it had been fashioned on an old jumbo jet. To the protestations of my daughter I took my sodden canvas trousers off and placed them on the bar of the exit door to drip metronomically away. She protested further, and I informed her: “No one’s going to come in now, the film’s about to start.” Allayed by parental confidence, she then directed me to rub her lower intestines as she had a stomach-ache. So, I’m sat in my damp undercrackers rubbing a small girls belly, when the fire exit flies open and a sneaky monk comes and sits next to me. The Girl is mortified, demanding I put my soaked britches back on. I inform her I’m not, and the monk is oblivious in a ‘world of pure imagination’.

The next day was our audience with the Lama himself. For a few dollars ($100) you can pop in and have a chat, or at least you used to be able to. We were all excited about this, what better way to spend a few minutes than with a lovely man that is on his twelve reincarnation, and hasn’t got a nasty bone in him. But he was a no-show, he had to go out of the country on business, a little rude, but we had no option but to forgive him. We wandered around the grounds and watched the Buddhist monks worshiping, and we were all shocked to see quite a few of the monks at the back talking and sharing images on mobile phones while the priest was giving a sermon–Well, when the cats away. I talked in church when I went once a month as a child, but I was not trying to come back with the top job, just picking up points for the scout patrol, and when boredom really set in, seeing how many prayer cushions we could collect undetected.

People use the expression surreal far too readily, but if you have played in a mountain stream with your kids while what seemed like every monk in North India washed their clothing around you, then strewn it out on the rocks to dry, while you disappear and reappear behind a small secret waterfall – that is somewhat surreal. Like the night before in the cinema as we exited, the monk had gone before the closing credits, a rampaging cow shot by on the narrow side street, which would have inflicted a nasty bovine injury if it had connected with us. I suppose the unusual becomes usual the more it happens.

My son joined the ‘Trot Club’ the day after. McLoed Ganj was the only place any of us got any food-based sickness in our three and a half months in India. I think we got ill from the unhygienically ‘washed’ plates from a street vendor, but the results are not back from the lab yet. There is a lot of fear about going to India and getting ill from the food, but if you are sensible, we ate hardly any meat and drank only bottled water. I lost nearly half a stone which allowed me to fit back into those budgie smugglers I bought when I was seventeen, which then mysteriously vanished, to rematerialize eleven months later.

My son had the first of his trilogy of his ‘screaming abdabs’, Sydney and Quito airports would complete the trilogy. Puberty was certainly about to wander into town, and he was probably ‘under the weather with the trots’ – as Philip Larkin and/or Alan Bennett may say? He was missing his close friends; his hormones were reaching out to his brotherhood across to the west. He stopped motionless in the deserted street and after an initial aforemath, he let loose with his teary emotional Shakespearean Roman emperor soliloquy:  “I just want to see Jamie… If I could just see him, just for 30 seconds, I would give all the money in the world, just for thirty seconds. If I could just see his face.” We are a little further down the incline and The Wife is already telling me not to laugh at him. He starts again, this time I expect him to fall to his knees and shake his fist at the God-of-missing-teenage-friends. We becalm him and tell him tomorrow we will make sure he speaks to Jamie on the phone and the internet. Jamie helps his psyche by informing him. “School’s really, really, shit. I wish I was travelling with you.” A repeat performance is mitigated by allowing at least an hours’ internet each day wherever possible. The Girl has been somewhat bemused by his street behaviour, and in a quiet moment alone with her the next day I ask her what she made of it: ‘He’s like a big baby.’ I explain that hormones are powerful devilish bastards, like an injured irate psychopath on crack just before payday, in child friendly eight-year old words way. Thinking now there may be more empathy for her elder sibling, she repeats her mantra: ‘He’s still like a big baby!’

The rains lifted, any reservations any of us had about our travails evaporated. We knew we had done the right thing coming away. We knew our older selves would thank our younger selves in the future, as we sit in our fattening pens, or watching the clock until our pensions kick in, or dribbling away in our old people’s home… or with our family gathered around our bed. I was once told a story by a friend whose uncle was on his last legs in hospital. “Any regrets, Uncle?” “Yeah, I wish I hadn’t spent three days in 1973 undersealing the bottom of a Ford Capri.”

The Wife is a great believer in mini retirements, lots of little ones along the way, that’s one of the main reasons we went ‘gapping’. If you are unfortunate enough to be born recently in Britain for example, you may never own your own home and you made be whipped and made to toil until you are 68! – If in fact you make it that far. Mini retirements are looking a lot more appetising now I would wager.

Next week: On the way to the Golden Temple.

@thewritingIMP  www.ianmpindar.com

BookCoverImage

Ian M Pindar writes books, and about himself in the third person sometimes, so it looks as though he has a huge team of dedicated professionals working around him. His latest book is in fact a novella and has the strange title of: ‘Foot-sex of the Mind’. It is not a Mills and Boon, but about finding out what is important in life far too late. It will take you four hours to read, or half the distance between  Shimla and McLoed Ganj by bus. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=ian+m+pindar

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