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It’s the dog fight moment.
Mum told me you were having a bad time in Jallandhar. The pollution, poverty/wealth, noise, family politics and so on.
This is the dog fight moment that I had in K. I’d been there a couple of weeks, long enough to know that very little happened that hadn’t been repeated on a daily basis since the 1920’s. Chatting with old men, chatting with the lads, drinking tea. Then it was the dog fight. And all the repeats and familiar accents stopped dead. Big ugly scarred dogs with muzzles, a 6 piece band and the nice old man from Walsall was drawing a circle and whacking anyone who came into it. The dogs were released and they fought.
That’s the moment when the distance of the life you’re in and the life you’ve left opens like the Red Sea and you gawp into a huge space.
Your photographs of the factory foundry reminded me of the other description of India as like a Fellini film – something strange and very complicated is happening right in front of you but at an impossible distance. India is very complicated and very intrusive : what happens takes place right there.
It must be hard to be stuck in the middle of family warfare, but I suspect that is how it is. And it’s not war, it’s the family being a family. The ‘englishness’ is accidental. The sheer noise in the village was disconcerting; the silence of the English actually the strange part.
It must be hard to be stuck in the middle of family warfare, but I suspect that is how it is. And it’s not war, it’s the family being a family. The ‘englishness’ is accidental. The sheer noise in the village was disconcerting; the silence of the English actually the strange part.
So you need to adjust to the life in India – it can’t happen the other way round. It is easy to be overwhelmed, but it is just a very big river passing underneath your bridge.
I’ll send this in bits via Facebook.
Speak tomorrow.
Dad x
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