A Writer of Varanasi: Writing of Saints and Warriors

As a child, I lived in Varanasi – that ancient city in India that seems older than all of human memory. Those were special days – idyllic summers spent in the shade of the guava tree in my grandmother’s house; the cold winters spent basking in the sun with a book in the backyard. All the while, the brass pennant of the old Shiva temple – of Barhajkothi – fluttered high above our heads, gleaming in the sun. It was a constant reminder, along with the periodic sound of the conch-shells ringing out in prayer - that we were fortunate to inhabit the city of Shiva.

I made up stories even as a child. The earliest stories I remember creating featured a brown bear that didn’t really do much except spend time happily living in a comfortable cave and occasionally charging some unwarranted intruder. I am sure psychologists would make more sense of that particular leitmotif of my childhood than I can. However my favourite memory is of sitting on a peedha – a low wooden stool – in the kitchen. My grandmother would be preparing the food while I ate my dinner. We always ate in these traditional thalis – huge metallic platters that gleamed dull pink-gold – and with matching bowls. As children, we got the big bowls, fluted like wide lotus flowers. For dinner, we would get a thali with a big bowl full of hot milk – from our own cows – with crushed up chapattis. And in a smaller bowl would be the vegetable portion of the meal – generally something combined with potatoes, because I was finicky consumer of greens.

While I sat and ate my dinner, my grandmother and aunts would cook dinner for the rest of us. There were stories about my aunts’ day at the university, and my grandmother’s memories of times past. And of course, my brown bear! My grandmother always patiently heard out the complicated incoherent epic sagas that must – in retrospect – have been terribly boring. And she always feigned an interest that seemed sincere. But then, our house was always full of stories. Everyone seemed to tell stories – of the past, the present, and in case of my favourite uncle, of distant lands.

As I grew in that house, I realised that all I wanted to do was to make up stories. Of course, I didn’t know precisely what I could make up stories about. So I asked my grandmother, the source of all wisdom in my childhood. She had a simple solution, one that I wondered hadn’t occurred to me earlier. She said “write stories about saints and warriors.” I think she wanted me to write about warriors because that was our genetic legacy. And she wanted me to write about saints in desperate hope that I would somehow be inspired to follow their example and behave well.

The problem was that saints are not a very clear concept in Hindu thought. So my grandmother would tell me about Meera-bai, the fifteenth century poet-queen who gave up everything to follow her dreams. Or she would tell me tales from the Mahabharata, where no one is particularly saintly. Every so often, if I had behaved particularly poorly, my grandmother would tell me about Sita – the ultimate in saintly behaviour. I personally thought she was a weepy dishrag, and I have a sneaky feeling that my grandmother wasn’t terrifically fond of Sita either. But the story had to be told – after all, Sita is the model of womanhood held up by traditionalists in society. Besides, we apparently traced our blood lineage back to Rama and Sita, so in a sense it was family history.

Of course, we would end each session with a flaming row: I would refuse to accept that such saps could ever be our ancestors. My grandmother would feel honour-bound to take offence and attempt to explain how the lineage extended back to them, all noted down in a miniscule letters on the early pages of our family Ramayana. I would challenge her on Rama – who I considered a particularly poor example of a man – and Sita – who I felt spent far too much time passively lamenting her fate. She would argue feebly until finally accepting that “yes, yes, but that is the way it is written in the books.” Then we would happily revert to snuggling up together for a tale that contained more blood, gore, adventure, valour, and somehow, less morality. I suppose even back then, we were renegades – my grandmother and I.

However, none of the above solved my problems regarding saints that I was supposed to write about. There was the “aghori” ashram across the street of course. The ascetics who lived there, I suppose, would qualify in some way as religious. Except the aghoris were wild-eyes men with matted hair, bloodshot eyes and unpredictable tempers. They were also not particularly pleasant, as I fully understood, even as a child. The aghori ashram also had a running feud with their next door neighbour, one of the leading entrepreneurs of the region.

The aghoris aren’t particularly the most desireable neighbours in any case, even by moderate Hindu mainstream standards. Simplistically, they are a tantric Shaivite sect of Hinduism. They take the idea of interconnectedness of death and life as their basic precept. As a symbol of this understanding, the gate-posts of the ashram were topped by human skulls. On the other hand, they consume liquor and dhatura, eat flesh, speak obscenities, dress scantily. There were always rumours of sex – of all forms – although they may have simply been rumblings of adults. We weren’t allowed to approach the ashram or enter its gates. In fact, my grandmother had an injunction against any of the girls in the house even giving alms to the aghoris.

Our entrepreneurial neighbour – of course – wasn’t too thrilled with seeing skulls from his own garden. So for a period of nearly three years, a tacit war was carried out between the aghoris and the capitalist. The businessman would periodically raise the common wall between his house and the ashram to block out the ghastly view of the skulls. The aghoris would wait patiently until the wall would be built up, cemented, painted freshly white. And then the next day they would raise the gate-posts of the ashram higher so that the skulls would tower again over the neighbouring wall.

The ongoing war between the aghoris and the capitalist of course provided much amusement to the rest of the neighbourhood. But the sight of human skulls was also a special lesson that Varanasi teaches its denizens. While they are children! Death is a fact of life, for most Banarasis. And it is neither to be feared nor dreaded. Instead it is a something to be mocked, laughed at, accepted as a pesky but familiar neighbour, and finally, embraced with love and affection. This is why the city is the cosmic cremation ground as well as the Anandvana, the forest of joy.

Perhaps that is why we all were so mocking of the funeral processions we constantly crossed. As you may know, Varanasi has a special place in Hindu philosophy. The city is believed to rest on top of Shiva’s trident, and thus Varanasi alone is not destroyed when Shiva dances the tandava. It also has special powers because of its unique mythico-geographical position. Simply living three nights and three days in the city is believed to grant a soul moksha upon death – liberation from the cycle of rebirths and the goal of all Hindus. Simply dying or being cremated in Varanasi is a great karmic act and can secure a better birth or a cosmic holiday in the Hindu paradise-spa. This is a reward for souls between death and birth and is by no means permanent; one is simply granted a short holiday from the cycle of rebirth by spending some time in paradise.

Of course this means that lots of people bring the dead to be cremated in Varanasi, and often the city seems to live a constant stream of funeral procession. Every few minutes one can spot grieving relatives, all clad in white, grim and exhausted, walking two abreast along the road. The corpse is generally carried on a make-shift stretcher of bamboo and wrapped in orange/yellow cloth, and covered with flowers. As the funeral proceeds, the pall-bearers and mourners chant out loud: “Ram naam satya hai” – “The name of God is true.”

As children growing up in Varanasi, we had our own version. So on our way back and forth from school, all crammed up in big school-buses, we would crane our necks out to check for funeral processions. “Ram naam satya hai” – the mourners would chant.

“Murda saala mast hai,” (“The bloody corpse is happy”), we would gaily chortle back. Nearly seventy grimy-faced cheerful urchins would stick out of bus windows to mock the demonstrations of grief in our city streets.

As an adult, I have often wondered if I ought to feel mortified at mocking the grief of those poor people carrying their dead to the cremation grounds. Yet, always, the Banarasi in me wins out: death must be mocked at and diminished. Otherwise its shadows grow so long and dark that it can snuff out all that is joyous and ridiculous in the world. Besides, I always remember the manic grins we got from the aghoris for the act. For that alone, our mocking defiance of death and grief was commendable. Unfortunately, all this means that the idea of writings about saints was quickly complicated by the masti (joy/madness) that Banarasis value above all else.

The second part of my grandmother’s injunction meant writing about warriors. We knew lots of those, of course. There was an ample supply in the family tree, without needing recourse to the history books. Of course, it helped that we lived in restless times, so we never needed to look too far for warriors. My father was an officer in the army. My great-uncle would always show up in the city wearing his cartridge belt across the waist-band of his dhoti, his rifle slung across his shoulder. Then there were sundry relatives, and constant feudal conflicts involving various family members, politicians, dacoits seeking amnesty, police chasing rebellious student leaders…In all, death, and violent death, never seemed too far away.

Besides, there are only two possible ends to war: victory or death. And all victories are similar, ephemeral, paving way only for another battle. An endless litany of battle victories makes for poor stories. So the only stories that can be told of warriors are of how they embraced death, gloriously, joyously, laughing into the bright sun even as the swords clanged, and ground grew warm and fertile with the spilled blood.

Yet mine was not a frightened childhood by any means. Or a traumatised one. It was an idyllic childhood in many ways where love and affection abounded and loyalty and laughter filled our lives. The only difference was that we were never protected from the reality of death – and its constant presence.

Not surprisingly then, a lot of my writing is about death and the joy of life. It is about people making sense of life in the face of death, or even re-affirming life even as they die.

Perhaps, in a strange way – and in strangely arcane ways – I am a Banarasi writer after all. Some part of me is constantly aware of the fragility of life, and its unbearable beauty, much like the fleeting sun-rises on the Ganges. Yet another part of me is simultaneously aware that the sunrises on the Ganges are never-ending, and are repeated unfailingly every day; that life and death go hand-in-hand, and are valuable, terrible, magnificent, for that conjunction.

I have been often told that my writing is violent. I have been told that my writing is disturbing often for glorifying that violence. But perhaps that is a lesson only understood by those who have lived in Varanasi: by those who have seen the sublime beauty of a red-gold dawn spreading like so much fine silk over the Ganges at Dashashwamedh ghat even as blue-grey smoke rises from the pyres at the Marnakarnika ghat nearby. No image of Varanasi would be complete without the intermingling of the two aspects, like Shiva himself, of life and death. Similarly, my writing would be incomplete without that image of death-life – an unbearably beautiful but wild-eyed Shiva smeared with the ashes of the funeral pyres, with snakes twirling around his neck and limbs, accompanied by a band of ghouls and demons – terrible and wondrous at the same time.

My writing – I suppose - is simply the same as that of writers of Varanasi for so many millennia – an invocation of Shiva in all his glory.

NB: From a talk presented at the University of Cordoba in 2006. PEN International Magazine's most recent issue carries a Spanish translation of this essay.

In praise of an ancient garment...

Even the most modest amongst us feel the occasional, overwhelming urge to boast about our achievements. For once, I am ready to boast about an acutely feminine achievement. Feminists, social scientists and ideologues will ramble on about the importance of motherhood, coming of age rituals, marriage etc. in a woman's life. While these are universally feminine milestones, the one I plan to talk about today is uniquely Indian.

As a child, my mother would paraphrase a thought from her favourite Hindi novelist, Shivani (or at least I think it was this writer). "Har ladki ke jeevan mein aisa samay aata hai jab usme banarasi sariyon ki chah paida ho jati hai" (Every girl reaches a stage in life when she desires banarasi sarees). Well, since we were from Banaras and iridescent streams of silk, brocade and zari seemed to flow as vastly and bountifully, as the Ganges, I didn't think much about this oft-quoted phrase.

As a teenager, we had moved overseas and over time, sarees became somehow "traditional" and not quite modern in my mind. Of course, I would watch my mother wear hers and envy the grace and elegance that the drapes bestowed on her incessantly active frame. Yet, I didn't feel the urge to try wearing a saree myself.

In my fashion-victim twenties, I bought Thai silk and Kanjeevarams, and raw silk fabrics only to convert them into fashionable and "terribly devastating" evening gowns, copied straight from the pages of Vogue. The dresses all went down to my ankles, slits ran far too high up my leg and necklines were cut as low as I could possibly manage. If my mother occasionally sighed and wistfully fingered the watered silk of a bright red or deep purple evening dress, I ignored her. "Poor silks, all this cutting and sewing takes away from their flow," my mother told me once while we poured over fashion magazines on her bed. I couldn't have cared less, even if I had understood her.

Then, something happened. First, I neared, and then crossed, thirty. And that meant that my body started doing strange things. Despite all the exercise regimens and diet controls, it began to look more like the rounded, voluptuous temple statues instead of the svelte Cindy Crawford of the flat stomach and the angular clotheshorse physique. More importantly, I realised that I wasn't willing to starve myself simply to fit into clothes that really weren’t designed for me in the first place. It also became more important to be myself, instead of looking like a fashion model.

And other strange things began happening. My cooking began to improve. I could just walk into the kitchen and the right spices would find their way into my hands. The balance would be right. Instead of recipes and cookbooks, I would cook with my nose, and eyes, and if you can believe this, intuition! And the final results grew closer and closer to my mother's cooking, and her mother's before that. My brother laughed and called it "cultural memory." I wasn't willing to believe him.

When my first book was published, I began getting invitations to all sorts of grown-up, formal parties, cocktails and book launches, teas and luncheons. And along with the invitations, came the desire to identify myself as an Indian. I needed to "look" Indian! To feel like a part of the literary tradition that had gone before me, even as I forged my own path. And especially since I felt closer to Meerabai and Jaidev rather than Dante and Bronte.

So I began borrowing sarees from my mother's closet. And my god, getting dressed became such a production. Initially, after about half and hour of fumbling about, I would scream for my mother. After the first couple of times, of tears and tantrums, my mother shook her head and announced that "you probably won't wear a saree very often anyway, so let me just put it on for you." This meant that I would stand like a dressmaker's dummy, wearing a petticoat and blouse, my arms outstretched, while my mom deftly draped the saree. Not that it was a daily routine. Maximum may be four times a year.

Sarees were still something exotic, something to wear for weddings and the really formal do's. And most of them still came from my mother's collection. I didn't own one, and didn't want to either.

Then some years ago, something incredible happened. We were shopping for fabrics to make into a dress shirt. I wanted chanderi silk, to make billowy, translucent, romantic shirts to wear with formal trousers and skirts. As we went through the bolts, my brother suddenly pulled out one. "This one is beautiful," he told me. I looked at the vibrant, rich pink shot with blue and green, light as a cloud floating between his hands. And suddenly I knew what my mother meant that cutting and sewing silks would take away from the flow. We checked the width and then got five and a half meters of the fabric. Then came the first adventure of its kind in my life: finding a matching fabric to make the blouse, going to the "matching centre" to find the "fall." I surprised myself as I went through the preparations like a pro. "Cultural memory," laughed my brother again.

For months afterwards, I couldn't help smiling every time I looked at that impromptu saree. The first time I wore it, I felt like Sanyukta, Padmini, Draupadi, Shakuntala, and every gorgeous woman who has ever worn a saree before me. I felt beautiful and seductive, and in one evening collected more complements than I can imagine. Perhaps, it was the saree, or perhaps it was just the joy and pride on my face. You see, that was also the first time I had draped a saree by myself (with a little help from my younger sister, specially with the pleats).

But the story didn't end there. Within months of acquiring my first saree, my best friend informed me of her wedding plans. "Its black tie, but wear a saree if you want to," she told me in a long distance call from Amsterdam. The old, childish me would have hesitated, even wondered about being the only one wearing a saree in a room full of designer evening dresses. The old not-quite-confident me would have found excuses, ranging from the European winter to owning nothing appropriate. But the new me, the cultural-memory-me, wasn't quite so hesitant.

I told my mother, who – in turn - informed her sister and my uncles’ wives. And suddenly, finding the right saree became the most important family expedition for everyone. Flurries of telephone calls between Banaras and Delhi, Allahabad, Lucknow and every other city in between determined the colours I preferred. "Light colours, pastels, nothing bright or contrasting, or eye-twisting. The bride's wearing white and it should complement her." My aunts scoured the saree shops and workshops. No! Nothing light or pastel was available. It was the marriage season. Didn't I know that?

Then my aunt called the weaver who has provided sarees for all the weddings, and childbirths and milestones for the many, many women in my family. He would make a special tanchoi for me, in the plainest pastel but the richest brocade. But time was running short as the wedding dates grew closer. Never mind, the blouse would be made in Banaras itself and the saree would be couriered to me. In the meantime, another aunt had found another saree and decided that someone travelling to Delhi would carry it, just in case the courier was delayed. She called me from the shop, "There is an ivory tanchoi and one pale yellow one which is gorgeous. Which one should I send?" Whichever you like, I told her.

Both the tanchois arrived on the same day. One, the colour of creamy lemon meringue and soft as butter, light as a feather. The other, a burnished gold like the morning on the Ganges in Banaras, and heavy like the river. I wore the heavier one for the wedding. Cultural memory seemed to kick in, even far away from my family as the saree draped itself in one go, the pleats sitting perfectly, without an effort, the pallu just settling itself softly on my shoulder. If I didn't know better, I would have thought my mom had magically, invisibly, draped it for me.

Friends I hadn't seen in years gasped in surprise and delight when I walked in. "Wow, you look different." And that was meant as a complement. I didn't even worry when the dancing started about how I would move. I danced for hours and remembered my grandmother who used to swim in the Ganges in her cotton sarees. She was right. Sarees were dead comfortable!

Through the evening, I smiled when people asked me if that was my "traditional outfit." Even on a dark, cloudy, rainy Dutch night, I felt wrapped in the warmth of the Ganges on a summer morning.

Now I know what mom meant by every girl reaching a stage when she desires banarasi sarees. I have tried explaining it to my younger sister but I think she will have to wait and find out for herself. For now, I just look at my growing saree collection and hug myself. My wardrobe has planned itself out for all the future milestones of my life. The literary awards shall all be received in severe tussars and plainest of Madhubanis. Mr. Right, when he walks in, will be seduced by the sexy elegance of cream chiffon. And if I ever get married, it will have to be in a tanchoi the colour of freshly ground turmeric.

But before I end, let me share a secret. My mom didn't tell me one crucial thing! Once you begin craving banarasis, the benchmark goes up. Now I really want a paithani, to wear for my own daughter's wedding (if I ever have a daughter!). But I won't be complaining if I get one much before that!

PS: This piece was first carried by www.sawf.org , but I just remembered it the other day and felt it deserved a resuscitation.

And in my veins flows the Ganges....

"Sabki ragon mein lahoo bahein hain, hamri ragon mein Ganga maiyya"

(Blood flows in people's veins, and in mine flows the Ganges)

What a strange thought! Yet that line from the perky song "Hum to aise hain bhaiyya" (We are like this) from the soon-to-be-released Pradeep Sarkar film Laaga Chunari Mein Daag brought back a lot of memories.

Actually, just a disclaimer: this is not really a music review, even though I have been listening to some of the songs over and over again. Along with the quoted song, there are really only two other songs that make this album lovely enough to be worth blogging. And primarily that is because I can't remember the last time Hindi cinema managed to pay such sincere homage to Banaras.

The first song - Hum to aise hain bhaiyya - is a surprising but long delayed ode to Banaras - the first notes are laden with the smells and sounds of early mornings in the city of my childhood: the clanging bells in temples, the rhythmic splashing of the Ganges waters against wooden boats, the masti powered by bhang or simply life itself. The song catches the spirit of the ancient but lively city I grew up in - not the city that tourists and pilgrims see but the one that is reserved for its inhabitants. Banaras has always been a city full of fun, laughter, wit, music; it has long been a city of masti!

The first time I heard the song, I ended up with a lapful of memories, wondering how and when I lost those magical times: those early morning walks to Assi ghat to watch the dawn; the chattering of teeth when we finally emerged from playing in the water; those delicious breakfasts of hot kale channe ki ghughri and jalebis dunked in glassfuls of hot milk.

Similar nostalgia came with the Meeta Vashisht and Shubha Mudgal's lounge-style version of the title song. Mudgal's voice and training has rarely been used so well by commercial cinema. The lyrics - in klishth Hindi - as spoken by Vashisht took me back to hot June afternoons when the sky would turn brown and gold with clouds of dust and then the aandhis would race down the emptied streets. And over that storm, Mudgal's voice flows as gently as the Ganges, and just as relentlessly.

I remember growing up in a city where women were always tougher than the men - and far more rebellious. There is a sense of innate confidence and a sankipanaa about Banarasi women that I have yet to find elsewhere. My grandmother could swim across the entire Ganges, and not even the flood water would faze her. My mother and aunts seemed to have walked to unheard beats of a different drummer from all others. Even cousins seemed madly rebellious; there were a memorably fashionable bunch who scandalised Banaras by wearing Zeenat Aman-style mini-dresses (this was back in the 70s!). And there was that fabulous - unnamed - woman who drove to the university every morning, past our house, on a massive Enfield! They were all individual storm winds - some who faded into the galis while others have swept through the world, changing and transforming it in their wakes. And Mudgal/Vashisht just brought all those long forgotten aandhis back into the light.

Finally, there is Rekha Bhardawaj's song that has been classified by reviewers as a traditional mujra number. What a shame! Its so much more...The song reminds me of sitting on a rooftop at dawn, watching as the Ganges turns the into miles of red and orange and yellow silk, like so many tanchois spread out for miles. And from somewhere far away comes the faint sound of riyaaz.

On warm summer nights, we would sleep on the chhat. The preparations would begin as soon as the sun went down, with water being sprinkled over the cement rooftops. Steam rose hissing and spluttering like so many cobras as the first drops hit the cement. Waves of heat would rise up - vicious, vindictive - and had to be drowned out by water for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the roof would be left to dry in the summer night. We would wait up there soaking up the sondhi fragrance of water on hot ground mingling with sweet guava and early jasmine blossoms. After dinner, we would gather up there to hear the sounds of the city - voices raised in conversation, the final aartis in the temples all around us, and then much later, voices playing antakshari. Sometimes the game would turn into an impromptu contest across the rooftops in the lane; not for long but enough to make song and laughter create a sense of community.

And sometimes you could hear far off sounds of music. Thumri perhaps, or the strains of a sitar. Was it magic? Was it even real? Or just nostalgia polishing the materially constrained circumstance that we know we faced back then? Does it matter? Especially Bhardawaj's marvellously disciplined voice can recreate that magical nostalgia with such ease.

With each listening, the album takes me right back to the Banaras I knew and grew up in - full of laughter, love, hope and masti. In fact each time I am shocked at the ease with which I can transport myself back to that magical land, erasing all that has intervened since, as if none of the distance, time or experience matters.

Perhaps the song is right...as a born and bred Banarasi, may be the Ganges - not blood - does flow in my veins!


PS: The final shot is by Tarun Vishwa. I don't even know if that is Banaras but it seems to bring back every memory of the place.

Fulfilling childhood dreams...

Sometimes I wish I could remember the man who helped built so many of my dreams when I was a child growing up in Varanasi of the 1970s. Yet I have only a hazy recollection of a skinny man on a rusty bicycle who brought around the weekly stack of magazines. I have a far better - and fonder - memory of those glossy stacks filled with pictures and words that seemed to be doorways to a world of fantasy.

Most of the magazines were grown up stuff - Dharmayug, that amazing literary magazine, and of course the Illustrated Weekly. There would be the film-zines, Stardust - the most coveted of them all. For the longest time, I could only turn the pages admire the pictures. I spent many years of my childhood waiting impatiently for the day when I could actually read and understand the words that filled those pages.

Of course, for us, there would be Champak, Chandamama and for a while Paraag, filled with stories and the "factual" bits - on history, culture and geography. And of course articles on far off places.

I would read the kiddie mags cover to cover, lingering especially over the travel and geography articles. All those places that I desperately wanted to visit and could not imagine how! Those were days before liberalization, and not only were currency exchanges strictly limited, there wasn't all that much disposable income around to throw around on foreign trips.

The closest we got to travelling overseas was watching Hollywood films where people spoke English all the time (and with odd accents), and lived lives so extraordinarily exotic that one could barely believe they were real.

Yet these are the stuff childhood dreams are made of...of remembered snippets from the Bond flicks where relaxing on a beach and sipping colourful cocktails seemed so normal; of treasure hunt films where seas were always impossibly turquoise blue; of Born Free brand of "kiddie" films where African skies seemed to turn every colour of the rainbow at sunset.

All through my childhood, I wanted to be in those films and magazines - in those places, doing some of those exotic things. I wanted to ski down a pristine white hill with nothing but two slim parallel tracks marking the trail (my only experience of the mountains was of the Himalayas where snow was heavy and the slopes too steep to warrant any form of skiing). I wanted to sail down the Nile as the sunset and watch the desert night swallow up the pyramids. I wanted to dress in glamorous khaki trousers and billowy white shirts and watch the elephants gather on the banks of the Zambezi. And I wanted desperately to be lost in the Amazon, trekking through the heavy foliage only to come upon suddenly on a spectacular waterfall.

For a while I kept a little scrap book of pictures cut out of magazines. It was a list of the places I wanted to visit in my lifetime. Every night I would mentally transport myself to an exotic place: Russia, Brazil, Austria, Samoa...and instead of counting sheep, I would list all the facts I knew about the place until drowsiness drowned all imagination. It was a little book of childhood dreams, even when they seemed impossible. Or perhaps because they seemed impossible.

But as I grew up things changed. Opportunities came up and we grabbed them by the armfuls: the Indian economy grew; my father took on a new job that took him overseas; then I won a scholarship that paid for an education overseas. After university, jobs came up in far off places - Africa, Latin America - and I jumped at each chance, using each one to travel and see all the places I had dreamt about for so many years.

One may well wonder why such a nostalgic post...well, because one place that had been on my list of childhood dreams was the Azure Window.
I remember seeing it first in a foreign magazine - perhaps the National Geographic - or at least in a magazine I wasn't allowed to snip up. To a child it seemed a place of impossible beauty. That is where I really wanted to go!

Yet somewhere in my travels over the year, it slipped out of my mind...not because I forgot, but perhaps I just stopped remembering. Until strangely enough this summer when a trip to Malta materialized rather spontaneously. (Actually, more accurately, the trip seems to have appeared in my life in January with a conversation with an Aussie and a Polish friend who had spent some time on the islands).

Then one afternoon this past summer, I stood on the rocks on the shore of Gozo, staring out at the Azure Window and felt like a very small child. All the wonder, awe, joy seemed to flood right back. We waded in the little coral edged pool behind the window and clambered on the rocks to get the best view. And yes, the water was impossibly blue - of this one particular hue that I remember from Parker's ink bottles, and the sky was so clear that it hurt to look out at it.


And I could only paddle about in the pool, with a silly smile on my face! After all, it isn't every day you get to fulfill a childhood dream...