LETTER TO...

Dearest...
The sun is setting and it is quite beautiful.
Elsewhere the setting sun is more beautiful. I know this because someone elsewhere has a more powerful camera, and is on holiday in a more tropical place. Or more historical. A pyramid perhaps, or a cave of swimmers.

I was supposed to be somewhere this morning, but a migraine ate my eye. I was dreaming when the doorbell rang, but I cannot remember. I have always lived furiously in my dreams. Once, I kept a dream diary, but then I wondered why.

It was my mother. She brought tulips. She arranged them and made me a cup of tea.

There was snow yesterday, but only a threadbare carpet, nothing to excite my nephew and nieces with. The doorbell rings again. It's the supermarket delivery man. 'Where's your snowman?' he asks. 'Where's the snow?' I counter. A little post-migraine banter. He calls me swee'hear', though he's never met me before. I like it when strangers on the phone call me 'love' or 'darlin'... It comforts me. I like it when my mother calls me Dilly Girl. It derives from Darling Girl, but only she knows how the derivation came about.

I fengshui-ed my flat last night and am sitting on my newly arranged sofa looking at the patch of visible light and branch-webbed sky. Why am I?
The pheasants reply. And I am satisfied.

Dearest, where are you? And will we ever meet? I am melancholic and content. Is this a perfect life?

Love...

FAITH (the other side of the coin)

Renoir

If I were to marry
it would surely
be springtime in England;

The birds would sing sweetly
all morning and
                     evening
The sun would shine brightly
                  but ever so gently;

My feet would step lightly
on a carpet of daisies...

White as the blossom
pure as the dove,
My heart full and golden
with love.

- Shaista Tayabali, 2013

Young Woman Picking The Fruit Of Knowledge, 1892, Mary Cassatt (for magpie tales)

A Cup of Snow

Last night while I was putting the paper bag out, the scent of snow re-awakened a memory. Not my own memory, but the memory of my favourite Uncle when he was 17 years old.
He was deeply in love at the time, and his misfortune was to be torn away from her for a family holiday in Kashmir. What could he do to prove his fidelity and steadfastness? He would bring back snow!
So on the last night, he trudged up to the highest part of the mountain in Gulmarg, and filled a bottle with fresh scented snow. He capped it, and on his return to the houseboat in Srinagar, tenderly tucked it into the fridge, awaiting its long journey home to Bombay. That night he slept the sleep of the valiant, victorious lover.

The next morning, to his utter horror, he discovered the bottle contained a mere quarter of its contents. A dribble of water. "Who touched my bottle of snow?" he bellowed. And my grandfather, equally horrified, confessed with deepest apologies. He had been terribly thirsty in the night, and discovering a bottle of cold water in the fridge, had thankfully glugged it down.


Image from the bbc website of a Kashmiri boy in Srinagar, India, carrying a bag of sand...