AUNT ALICE AND THE MARSHMALLOW FLOWERS

Dear Aunt Alice,

Somewhere, in other worldly places, you must surely know that I have inherited your perfect signet ring. Initials AJ carved in pretty curving script. I have been wearing your ring from the moment I received it from your niece Mary, because she thinks I am an aunt worthy enough to be in your mould. I thought of taking it off before a jaunt into London to keep it safe, but decided I wanted to take you with me since I suspect the last time you tripped around London as a young woman was, perhaps, a hundred years ago.

Liverpool Station was freezing cold, but once we were in London proper - Oxford Street proper - I warmed up. No snow to offer you this Christmas, but the lights! An assortment of charities paid towards these giant leaping angel figures. Beautiful for the crush of humans below to behold.

Shopping commenced. I'm not sure you would have approved of my purchases, but they were safe enough - a cosy camel turtle neck sweater, a leather bag and a pair of sunglasses. All on sale! Mind you, the prices, even on sale, would probably shock you. To ease the shock, my sister Angelina ordered cronuts and hot chocolate from a famous bakery called Dominique Ansel. Now this would have impressed you - a marshmallow cut like a crown was dropped into steaming hot chocolate, instantly blooming into a flower...

Later, on Great Marlborough Street, we stood outside Liberty and admired the Tudor Revival frontage. Did you know the timber was built from the ship HMS Hindustan? Or that in 1885, Liberty brought forty two villagers from India to stage a living village of Indian artisans? These handy facts are available from an extraordinary web of information us global villagers dive in and out of 'online'. I wonder what you would have made of Wikipedia? Here is something Wikipedia doesn't know: my father had three of his watercolours exhibited and sold by Liberty in the 1970s. Wikipedia you may have been on the fence about, but my father you would have loved.

I did feel a trifle faint in Liberty - so many people! - so was glad first to plop onto an inviting bed in Anthropologie, and then to mesh our way from Carnaby and Kingly Streets towards a Japanese restaurant, which also served my favourite Korean dishes, and to my delight, a delicious plum wine. For a nineteenth century Englishwoman, I suspect your gastronomic tastes possibly didn't stretch to the Orient, but maybe Mary will surprise me and tell me you loved experimenting with the new!

I got muttered at by a stranger for temporarily blocking the entrance to the tube - did I mention this was the day of the human crush? At these moments I am very much the hokey local from a tiny Cambridge village. By the time our train was hurrying us home, we were shattered and ready to slide, submerge and otherwise disappear into sleep. I hope you enjoyed the day out. Today is the last day of the year 2016. Soon 2017 will be upon us. 2016 has been a truly difficult year, for most of us, not least your beloved Mary. If you possess any magic, wield away. We need some magic. I can only be sure of one thing in the new year - I will continue to be the most loving and creative aunt it is possible to be. Keep your spirit beside me!

With love,
Your new friend-in-auntyhood across the century,
Shaista

Photos courtesy Debra Edward

AND A SUNNY MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU AND YOU AND YOU

And then the end of the year is upon us. I don't know about you but I am not entirely heartbroken to see the end of this difficult year. Under the blazing Singaporean sun, I am letting go one month at a time.

In the concentrated heat, amid koyals and beetles, monkeys leaping in through windows for fresh bananas and the occasional languorous green snake, I eat and unwind my own coiled tense muscles.

In the midst of celebrating Christmas eve, the nephew and I contemplate a tired beetle, struggling to climb aboard a raft...  not dissimilar to me in the final stretch of this year. 

In his last hours, the beetle had two friends trying to build walls of protection around him. 

Later, at Christmas lunch under tropical sun, Raf insisted I eat with the upturned beetle beside me ... oh well, all part of the great merry go round of life. Merry Christmas everyone! 

HANAFUBUKI

I rarely cry, because I cried so much in the early years post diagnosis of this and that. But yesterday at the hospital the gentle kindness in a friend's 'how are you?' sent me to the tissues. I've been having a rotten time with the disease acting up, which always makes my world narrow, my fears bloom. Meanwhile April is coming to an end and our cherry tree has stretched from white glory to a brown study. 

Angelina (my sister) had some friends over for tea, and their daughter, quiet as a mouse in the house, blossomed into a mixture of Ariel and Puck under the cherry tree. Painstakingly, she gathered individual sakura, collected them into her hat and then poured them over our heads. 'If only,' she mused, 'the petals could fall all at once!' I have since learned this is exactly what happens in Japan after the hanami festival: the sakura falls thick and fast and the word for this is hanafubuki. 

After hospital, coming home to little girls who hand me petals and feathers, is a delight…

I like the floophing, flumping feel of sakura. And so do my nieces who carry the fallen delicates across to me and fix them in my hair. Today I feel more alive than yesterday. Everything that was not good yesterday is better today. Angelina whipped up some baking magic and delivered apple roses to my door even though she is sick with the streaming cold that has beset the twins. I am being kept at arms' length for my own sake.

With that special evening light streaming in this evening, my nose dusted with icing sugar (a hanafubuki of the baking kind), I feel hopeful again. And so it swings. Apparently this is what creative types do. But even in my despair and even in my hope, I am aware of the stories round the globe, and since there is little I can do, for now I shall try to keep up morale. Blow down cherry blossom if you must, I am standing in the sun.

Hanami sakura

Spring which starts in March and stays till May is a very busy period in Japan. It is the season when the most beautiful festival of Hanami is celebrated. The Sakura trees (or the cherry blossoms) all over Japan come into bloom for between seven to ten days. People hold outdoor parties to view the cherry blossoms.

Emperor Sage of the Heian period held flower-viewing parties with sake and feasted underneath the blossoming boughs of sakura trees in the Imperial Court in Kyoto. Poems were written praising the delicate flowers, which were seen as a metaphor for life itself, luminous, beautiful, fleeting, ephemeral.

Can one celebrate Hanami even when tragedy occurs? Can one bear the joy of new beginnings all around when one has lost or is grieving?

I ask this because the beloved Japanese family who housed and adopted my younger brother when he was teaching in Japan, have suffered a tragedy. Their younger daughter Yuki, my brother's friend, has died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack.


This is my Hanami sakura poem for her, and for my brother.


Yuki-san

Yuki, the cherry tree

is quietly blooming now

but the wind is so impatient

some petals are floating down.

Yesterday,

my mother and I

stood in the doorway

watching the willow

Green leaves are perfect in spring.

Today,

the scent of rain is here

I am drinking hot tea

sweet with memories

and listening to birds sing.

Yuki, the cherry tree

is empty now

the wind stole all the petals

but the earth is full

with warm white snow

and I know

you will return soon.

The cherry tree

will bloom again

and I know

you will return soon.

Shaista, copyright 2010

images from greg takanama hanami & cherry blossoms anime blog

On New Year's Eve

A cold is a cold is a cold
But not when you have Lupus
It is a beautiful day outside
Golden and silver lights on a breeze,
A breeze I cannot feel
A natural beauty beyond me
Trapped as I am in pain;
No painful oblivion am I accorded
No heady drugged state do I lie in
No, I am aware of everything
Although I begin
to feel the collapse of sense -
I am struggling with pounding heart
and shaking hand
and aching back and legs
and outside the faint song of bird
and rumble of train
and tapping of spoon against cereal bowl,
I hear it all
and sometimes see nothing at all
in the darkened room
As the world rushes by
and life is lived on
New Year's Eve.

31 dec 1997