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You taught me Waiting with Myself –
Appointment strictly kept –
You taught me fortitude of Fate –
This — also — I have learnt –
An Altitude of Death, that could
No bitterer debar
Than Life — had done — before it -
Emily Dickinson
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A walk in Fort Cochin
Always offers
The opportunity to spend.
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To spend uncounted years of pain
Again, again, and yet again
In working out in heart and brain
The problem of our being here,
To gather facts from far and near
Upon the mind to hold them clear,
And knowing more may yet appear
Until one’s latest breath to fear
The premature result to draw -
Is this the object, end, and law,
And purpose of our being here?
Arthur Hugh Clough
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Amongst the many gifts I was kindly given this Christmas, one is particularly cherished:
An old pendulum wall clock.
It puts me in mind of the clocks I saw as a boy, in the offices of railway ticket clerks and bank tellers.
A good friend remembered my commenting on such a clock in an old-fashioned Fort Cochin restaurant, as we sat eating Sunday breakfast. He secretly searched Cochin for something similar – but none were to be found. Months later, he came across one for sale in Palakkad and quietly bought it as a surprise for me on Christmas Day .
The clock-face reveals it to be an old “Seth Thomas” timepiece, made in the USA.
Quite how this clock, manufactured in America during the 1930′s or 1940′s, arrived in rural Kerala will probably always be a mystery.
The Seth Thomas company was a well-known clock maker. Their most famous clock is probably this one:
In Grand Central Terminus, New York.
The dimensions of my newly acquired Seth Thomas are more modest.
I realise it is not a priceless antique. But it has simple elegance and character, plus an intriguing provenance.
Serendipitously, Seth and Thomas are names that span four generations in my family. One was my father’s name and is held by my house today.
Add the fact that a dear friend spent so much time and effort to find this clock for me, and it gains value beyond rupees.
Now, when I sit reading and musing, my treasured clock will gently chime the hours past.
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“..I may look back on every sorrow past,
And meet life’s peaceful evening with a smile:
As some lone bird, at day’s departing hour,
Sings in the sun beam, of the transient shower..”
William Leslie Bowles
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There are many ways to celebrate this festival.
One of the most touching is when friends, having heard that your plans for a family Christmas collapsed,
Invite you as “Guest of Honour” to share Christmas evening with their family.
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Then enchant you with the innocent entertainment of song, dance, party games and laughter,
All served with warm affection.
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A walk along Fort Cochin sea front on Christmas morning.
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Happy Christmas!
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My staff formally extend to you the season’s greetings.
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Informally, Dalila Shaji and Anu wish you:
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Just minutes after sunrise
Morning chores begin.
Hard work
For old joints
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My banana plant continues to flourish.
Five new plants have appeared around its base.
While above, flower scales open sequentially to reveal row after row of banana flowers.
With many more scales left to open, I am in hope of an ample harvest.
An elegant sufficiency of bananas.
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A taxi was booked and the meal almost cooked,
To welcome my son and new daughter.
But the fates intervened
In this oft dreamt of scene.
Things don’t always go as they ought to.
Due to technical glitches and climatic hitches
They are sitting at home in DC.
While I sit in Cochin
Alone – with a gin.
An ominous sign, you’ll agree.
My solution is flimsy, no more than mere whimsy:
Try displacement activity.
I’m off to buy pot plants -
Small palms – in the off-chance
It will keep me from dark misery.
When fate seems adversary, a trip to the nursery
Can settle my pulse; keep me calm.
Some new vegetation
May soothe my vexation.
I am told nature acts a balm.
Though my rhymes are not clever, forgive this endeavour
To rescue myself from depression.
It was just an attempt
To pre-empt the contempt
Of self-pity – and future confessions.
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As the decades slip past, Christmas shopping can be strangely poignant:
Ghosts of Christmas Past, that we think lie safely buried, merely rest.
They are always ready to be conjured up.
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“My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.”
From Vacillation IV, by William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
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A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times when we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities dirty and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wineskins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Journey of the Magi T.S. Eliot
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The race for Christmas and all its dreams has started.
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The fine tuning of my athletic frame and focused mind are almost complete.
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“A sari for Dalila, a dhoti for Shaji”
Anu and I have spent weeks psyching-up and are trained in the necessary teamwork skills.
But a man in his fifties and boy in his teens may not be the ideal couple for sari shopping.
Confidence peaks too quickly:
“You think Dalila like this colour, Papa?”
“I’m not sure. What do you think?”
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“More baubles for the Christmas tree”
“And paper stars for the roof terrace”
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Thank goodness!
We’re on the home-straight.
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(From a crossing last week)
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From night’s reflection to the dawning of light.
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Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum
Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem
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Pictures taken in my upstairs hall at dawn
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My son and his beautiful new wife are soon to arrive.
The house must be ready to welcome them – in its sparkling Christmas livery.
The staff have been feverishly busy, ensuring all is as it should be.
On Monday their attention turned to our Christmas tree.
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I purchased the tree from London, some time back, during the height of summer. And, as serendipity would have it, in the bemused company of both my sons and their partners.
The tree is not small; measuring two metres (seven foot) once assembled. Its weight is considerable: transporting the tree to India cost more, in excess baggage fees, than the original price. With all the traditional paraphernalia of Christmas, it lies boxed up for most of the year, in the roof terrace store-room.
Setting it up is a major task; positively daunting. But fortunately the staff will help me.
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Who am I kidding?
They do all the work.
I supervise from my rocking chair, with a cool glass of something in my hand!
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It’s not always that you get a second chance,
Even in computing.
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A few days ago, whilst editing a new post, I blundered. Attempting to compress the picture files, I irreversibly converted them into little more than thumbnails. Such a loss is hardly shattering but it unsettled me. My impatience while tackling a new procedure had been needless.
I had been a little tired and clumsy that day. Even before my mistake, when gathering the photo images into a new parent folder, the computer seemed barely under my control. Rather disconcertingly, the new pictures disappeared completely at one stage.
But this vanishing trick turned to my advantage.
I have just discovered where the folder of unedited pictures was hiding. That original parent folder, its images still uncompressed, has been found!
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And now, with absolutely no apologies for self-indulgence, I re-present them
- uncompressed -
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“…and was lost, but is found…”
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Synchronicity is at play. The pain of loss and hope of discovery are described in other lives…
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Sunday morning called for another breakfast at the Sri Krishna Café,
A sensual feast of taste, smell and colour.
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With just un soupçon of people watching, on the side.
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When my friend Sunil entered a couple of his pictures into a local art show, I knew I must make the effort and attend the opening.
Six in the evening is relatively late for me to be gallivanting on the mainland, so an auto-rickshaw was summoned.
We chuntered our way through the evening traffic, across the bridges to the mainland and rush hour gridlock, but finally arrived.
Anu helped me up the steep and narrow stairs to the gallery.
Sunil and the owner warmly greeted me. Young artists, recently graduated from Thrissur, came to say hello.
Vegetable samosas and chai, served in flimsy cardboard cups, were offered.
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They put on a fine show.
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Yesterday morning found me waiting at the jetty.
We had just missed a ferry. There were twenty minutes to watch and wait.
Photo-opportunities effortlessly presented themselves and time happily clicked by.
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Later I downloaded the pictures from camera to computer.
Mindful that picture space on the WordPress servers has limits, I opted for measured frugality. I would compress the size of my new photo files.
In the click of a mouse it was done.
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But this was an act of undue haste. I had not checked which level of file compression was suitable.
My photographs were reduced to hardly more than postage stamp size. Their intensity was lost. They were spoilt.
Belatedly I read the warning:
“File compression can not be undone.”
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I have relegated the pictures into a slideshow, hoping their impoverished pixels might pass unnoticed.
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Note to self: watchful waiting has its merits.
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