BÁC PHUOC, BEGINNING ANEW

The chapel hasn’t changed much since its last refurbishment. Since my first visit to give thanks in 2009, for surviving the worst and longest of my hospital admissions. 

Usually a quiet spot, quiet enough to hear the hopeful weight of a thousand prayers, today there were two gentlemen on their mobile phones, one in heated exchange with his caller. Three Muslims observed their afternoon namaaz and one man walked straight up to the altar, and communed with his rosary. Is a Buddhist noticeable in prayer? If a Buddhist were to perform prostrations, they would appear no different to a Muslim. A Christian counting rosary beads appears no different to a Hindu with his mala. 

There were no women in the chapel today. Normally that would give me pause, but I wanted to sit somewhere and think about my friend Dr Hong Phuoc Ho. We were always in dialogue from the moment we met in late 2005... we were forced into a sort of silence by the ferocity of his last years with Parkinson’s. And even with the profound physical challenges it brought to his muscle control, Dr Ho still sang a few lyrics when Dad commanded him to this summer, and during our last call, he tried to tell me he had dreamed of me ... but the details I will never know. 

When the news came on Wednesday night, a heavy stone landed on my heart. Grief can be instantly physical. I cried and cried. The next morning I dreamed of rocks falling, threatening to crush the person below. To crush me. Dr Ho had suffered in the prison of his body, and in the prison of his memories of the Vietnam war; in the dream I was afraid of the damage those rocks could inflict, but there was no pain. And I woke up. 

What I do have to hold are all the memories of sixteen years - and the hopeful joy of a friend appearing suddenly in the middle of your life, to challenge and to enhance, to delight and engage the deepest and truest parts of our lives. 

Being in Addenbrooke’s the day after his passing in that very hospital allowed me not only time in the chapel, but also communion with the art on the corridor walls - this is one of the coolest images and will now remind me of Dr Ho - fierce and playful, suffering and equal to the task. 

For some reason, the art up at Addenbrooke's no longer has the name of the artists attached to the art. Perhaps this is a Covid change. I shall update when and if the artists' names are included again. The central piece of the young Vietnamese boy is a silk painting titled 'Fight Till The End' by Cố Tấn Long Châu. Báo Ảnh Việt Nam, 1967.

FOOTSTEPS OF A MUNTJAC

From June to June I don't know who I am,

though I walk the old familiar paths, 

tracing and retracing into muscle and sinew

Who are you?

Who are you?

Who are you?

I am a Pokemon hunter

with chronic illness and no car, no invisibility 

cloak to protect me. 

I am a daughter, but not a mother.

I am a Queen of this, 

but not that.

I am a traveller who stays still for so long

she forgets she once walked 

among Inukshuk, and between redwoods. 

I am a reader who ceased to read.

Instead, I watch a bright screen move me

while my eyes and brain exchange 

the same, tired greeting

Here again?

Here again.

Here. Again.

A muntjac looked across the field 

at me, not trusting the scent of me.

We share this earth so cautiously. 

(c) Shaista Tayabali, 2020

prompt from Dverse Poets, ('What day is it anyway?'); image from Wildlife Watch: Forest of Dean

inspiration: my friend Helena, who walked in the garden with me, sunshine on our faces, muntjac footprints beneath our feet, and the wild world of hope blinking in the possibilities (Helena reminds me... I keep forgetting, am too tired, too sick, gripped by infections and fibromyalgia.) 

CLIVE JAMES, ARS MORIENDI

‘Put that down.’ 

Clive always said that, if he thought I turned a phrase neatly. That’s good. Put that bit in. 

‘In’ to the ongoing double narrative of our lives that we were both writing separately even in our moments of togetherness on the Addenbrooke’s infusion ward. 

We met on one ward - D4 – hooked up to the same treatment of intravenous immunoglobulins, both under the care of the same wonderful immunology consultant, Dr Kumararatne - and then a few years later, on G2, the new incarnation. There is going to be a third iteration, but Clive will miss that one.

Death is so annoying. I feel a bit cheated as we all do when the continuity of our conversation with friends gets interrupted. But the nature of a writer is to personally provide the material for imaginary conversations to continue for all of time. Meet a person once and if they make an impression, you can re-meet them. Take down the book from the library of your mind and find the chapter titled ‘Clive’ or ‘Shaista’. In our case, that first meeting in April 2012 on D4 was not destined to be our last. Four years passed from our first meeting and one day a nurse told me that Clive had gone up to another Indian patient and hailed her across the tubes, ‘Shy Star! Lovely to see you again, kid.’ Except it wasn’t me. So I asked the nurse to book our next slots together if possible and on we went for the next three years, him booking in concordance with my dates if I hadn’t done so. We emailed throughout the years. 

It was a strange friendship because Clive saw himself as mentor to a new young female writer. But the not very new or very young writer had no such notion. I was often and often extremely direct with Clive when he made remarks that didn’t sit well with my own sense of self and my feminism. Dude, seriously. You can’t say that! Or at least, you can’t say that and then expect me to take your praise of my work seriously. Clive once said I had a type of arrogance not dissimilar to his. Eek. Make of that what you will. But presumably he never imagined a pipsqueak would squeak back. Or roar back, baring her teeth. Mostly it amused him, and probably made him want to persist with that thread but for the fact that he genuinely cared and eventually ceased to undermine a real friendship. One during which he swiped my favourite snuggly hat. One during which he introduced me to Tom Stoppard. One during which he offered to send an essay of mine about Les Murray to Les Murray. But I never got around to it, because life with illness is an interrupted life. Hold a thread here, concentrate on keeping it unbroken, and another one, just over there, breaks. Les died six months ago.

Clive’s eyes would light up when he saw me. And this was because if I walked on to the ward, I was still alive. If I was alive, there was conversation to be had and a moment to be shared. Preferably a merry one but I never held back on sharing my sorrow, depression or painful reality. I lifted up my eyelid once to show Clive the various shunts and blebs that my glaucoma surgeon has sown in over the long years to save some sight. And Clive wove the moment into one of his poems. 

A year before we met for the second time, Clive had been in correspondence with and then lost a fellow cancer patient. She was, believe it or not (but if you have read that article you will know this to be true), also Indian and, also a blogger. Shikha Chhabra wrote under the pseudonym Oblomov; her blog was titled Oblomov’s Sofa, and Clive mentioned her in the Guardian. It was a respectful nod he offered her, one that meant for a brief sweet while, Shikha was the acclaimed writer she was always meant to be. She died at 24, so losing me to an early arrival of Death was not implausible. And I have brushed that cloak - or did the cloak brush me? Either way, it has not been my time yet to cause that particular clutch to the heart and breath that hearing of Clive’s death caused me. I am writing because he would expect me to. Because he’d think it a wasted opportunity and because I know he always checked my blog, ostensibly to see what I was up to, but also to see if I was writing about him. He was rather disappointed that I hadn’t brought the ‘yoof’ in as he once had hoped I might. 

I have IVIg tomorrow. It’s a Thursday. And Clive won’t be there as he hasn’t been for the past several months. In his last email he made light of a recent operation, and I chose, ridiculously, to pretend he just might merry his way back to the ward. Even though I knew he wouldn’t. But he had already outlasted that type of ‘knowing’ for ten years. 

Death is so annoying. I am so tired of it. I ought to respect it and fear it, but really... I can’t. Not this death anyway. It was preceded by so much humour that the cloak looks a little less terrifying now. A cheery pathway is being cleared for us by the kid from Kogarah. 

And presumably, heaven and hell aside, I will hear him hail me again someday, his eyes lighting up and my cheeks and lips curving up. Unless of course he mistakes that other Indian girl for me... 

BIRTHDAY TREATS AND RUINS

It's not like when you're 4 and you know exactly what you want your birthday cake to look like, or when you're 9 and you organise a fancy dress party with your cousin because you have a dress that makes your handcrafted wand look perfect, and she has the perfect magician's top hat… it's different now. But still, it's your birthday, so you try to find some magic.

Just around the corner from me, in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire…

At the entrance, some advice from George Bernard Shaw on birthdays… I'm afraid I disagree with you here, dear GB…

but ah! your writing shed…

Built around a central steep-pole frame, so Shaw could follow the arc of the sun's rays, it was dubbed 'London' by its bearded owner - unwanted visitors were kept away by being told he was 'visiting the capital'… we were therefore surprised to find a telephone above the typewriter, but suspected that was in lieu of a dinner gong - his wife, Charlotte, needing some way of calling her husband in from the land of words. In keeping with the irony of Shaw's instructions to a birthday girl, his house, a paean to Edwardian Arts-and-Crafts days, was closed for modern 'electricals', but the gardens were open and my friends had brought a picnic…

Across from Shaw, the Church of St Lawrence, somewhat newly ruined, and then twist through three kissing gates, take a selfie with sheep, and you arrive at the Apollonian influenced Greek revival church, built at the request of Sir Lionel Lyde, who decreed that 'what the church united in life, it should keep separate in death'. Interesting marriages, the Lydes and the Shaws!

The weather held, the sheep did not leap over the fence to knock the offending selfie-taker, my friends sang 'happy birthday' in church - where it sounded hallowed and melodious - and I even discovered a plaque commemorating a Lieut. Colonel Monier Williams, of the Honourable East India Company's Service, who was Surveyor General of Bombay; also of his son Alfred, ensign in the Grenadier Regiment Bombay Infantry, who fell, at 19, gallantly leading the Storm of The Pass of Nufoosk - a piece of Indian/British history I had never heard of. So I suppose you don't need to be 4 or 9 to enjoy your birthday - you just need the right friends.