At home, in Delhi

Hotels tend to promote themselves with ‘home-away-from-home’ connotations – telling guests about the available comforts, the conveniences designed to make their travels easy, and, most of all, the friendly, personalised service. Sometimes, guests leave testimonials to the effect that ‘the hotel staff were like my family’.

And if you watch closely, you’ll often see guests making too-intimate conversation with the waiters and other staff, in a unilateral effort at connection in faraway places.

In February 2008, I was at the Hyatt Regency Delhi, when I sat facing a man who really needed to connect:

A man who looked like Freud, nursing a red wine in the Executive Lounge, is showing the waiter photos stored on his phone.

My son and his girlfriend, he says.

My other son and his girlfriend. Neighbour’s daughter. My mother-in-law, he says with a mixture of affection and amusement. Travelling in Canada.

He shuffles through a few. My daughter is in the wedding … my daughter and this girl are good friends.

This is today, here in Delhi, he says more loudly, awaiting the waiter’s reaction.

Yes, yes, Delhi, says the waiter, happy to see the familiar among these family shots.

He scrolls on: Here’s my backyard, that’s an owl.

Snow … this is near where I live.

This is my neighbour. The girl who got married, this is her house.

Oh, said the water.

We had a party for Valentine’s Day, I don’t know if you have Valentine’s Day …

Yah, eh, February … February 14, the waiter says, as if to prove that he knows it.

The men get together and cook a meal … for the women.

The waiter nods politely.

My brother-in-law … this is in New Hampshire. This is a party there … his daughter is getting ready to go to college.

My nephew.

My brother-in-law.

My wife. My son. My father.

The waiter asks after his father.

He’s, uh, 81 – he’s old, the man says as he scrolls on.

What kind of dog is it?, the waiter asks when the next photo appears.

It’s a pug. P-U-G.

This is behind my house … sunset.

Business trip I took to Minnesota. Back to my mother-in-law’s house. I think this is Christmas time. My in-laws have a small cottage on a lake … it’s beautiful.

Again, The waiter nodded politely.

It was cold … we all got up and had coffee on the dock.

An associate of Freud turns up, watches the proceedings for several moments before he interrupts … Excuse me, he says to the waiter, before turning to Freud: Weren’t we meeting in the restaurant?

Freud looks up briefly: I think we’re meeting here. We’re here, he says as he goes back to showing the waiter his photos as the other man comes to sit opposite him … it’s an antique, he says, even as the waiter turns to the other man to take his drink order.

The first man shifts his attention to his associate. They eat at 8.00, 8.30 here, he says. So did you go to surgery? How’d ya do?

Life

To be an artist is to believe in life.

                  Henry Moore

In praise of the weekend away

These happy snaps were taken on a Saturday-to-Monday weekend in Daylesford. Lazy brunches and coffees, getting around the lake and the Sunday produce market, and a quick wander through what's showing at the Convent. And facials at Mineral Spa, and a long, delightful dinner at Lake House. Hard to beat.

Wall photo

The social writer

At LitDrift this week, this post from Tania Paperny called 'On Loneliness and Productivity'. We want to be social creatures, writers. Sigh. Quoting:

I need both. I need time set aside for reading. I need to hang out with my friends. I won’t be satisfied by my day if at the end of it, I read a great book, wrote a great short essay, but talked to no one.

Carpe diem

Lesson of the day: Life is too short to waste doing things you don’t enjoy. Not a novel concept, apparently, but today two people in two separate instances told me things that brought it to the front of my mind. One said he retired early and now accepts some part-time work - and how that's reduced his stress - and one said he turned down lucrative alternative careers in order to pursue his passions. And someone at work is retiring so that she can paint. So, the lesson of the day: Life is too short to waste doing things you don’t enjoy. Question is: Do we learn? Will I?

Attraversiamo

Of all the books I read in 2009 – and, admittedly, I did not get through nearly as many as I’d have liked – the one that perhaps struck the greatest chord was – wait for it – Eat, Pray, Love. This is a big admission for me: during the year, I read beautiful poetry (if I did read anything, it was part of a poetry binge of sorts), some interesting novels (you know, highbrow literary stuff the enjoyment of which I don’t need to explain) and other non-fiction (John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe – another three-word, three-comma title – that perhaps figured second in the 2009 greatest chord-striking stakes), but it was this book that got to me, that stayed with me.

This book that I bought so reluctantly, that I baulked at because of its immense, folksy popularity, and the author’s voice of which I had already presupposed I would not enjoy. Well, many times I really didn’t enjoy Ms Gilbert’s voice. Often enough, she grated, she whined, she stubbornly didn’t help herself or see the rut she was in for what it was.

But then, there were things like this:

… I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time – everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and I will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else.

And this: ‘Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognised yourself as a friend.’

There were things like India, like bel far niente, like Ketut, like Richard, like Liz telling Wayan: ‘But I was always coming here. I thought about one of my favourite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.’

And this: ‘Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.’

There was all this chatty profundity, all this stuff that was – hey – true. And perhaps it was all the stuff I was going through, perhaps it was all about the timing, but it resonated with me (and, it seems, the millions of others who also bought copies). I read it quickly, and more eagerly than I have many other books – I read it with emotion rather than intellect, and took notes because I was worried I would forget. I would stop in places, and pick it up weeks and weeks later, and read slowly or again eagerly according to some cosmic instruction.

And finally, I recognised not only the sadness, the searching, and the providence in the parts I quoted above, but also this:

Somewhere in me I am able to recognise that this is not my melancholy; this is the city’s own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it.

And this:

I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don’t fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late – through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures – into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person – the magnification of one life – is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody’s but my own.

Natalie Merchant at TED

Great video from the TED 2010 conference of Natalie Merchant singing a few songs from her new album Leave Your Sleep – the result of a project to research old poems and set them to music. Watch for the gorgeous ‘The Janitor’s Boy’, by Nathalia Crane.

I haven't made up my mind about ...

The time to make up your mind about people is never.

Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn), The Philadelphia Story

Lebensfreude

Last August, while visiting friends in Switzerland, I pulled a card out of deck that they used for their children. Each card contained a suggestion, of a sort, for kindergarten students about to face the day – things like ‘Cherish your friends’ or ‘Smile’ (in Swiss-German, of course).

The card I pulled out said ‘Lebensfreude’, and I liked it so much I wrote it down.

My basic, basic grasp of German didn’t prevent me from stringing the meaning together. Life joy, I exclaimed. I looked at the card and the happy stick figures on it, and thought, ‘Yes, this is how we’re going to go today.’