Old woman

And the rains came...which meant avoiding puddles if possible as they are flavoured by the open sewers...

Decision made, last day in Pondy. Train to chennai in three hours....and should arrive in puri at some point on Wednesday..

Its been an odd few days, Gemutlichkeit is how I would describe it, if only because I've never found a suitable English translation:-)

But its odd how things surface sometimes...and here in Pondy a swathe if old memories which had lay hidden for years began to bubble...seeming more accessible as fiction they became thirty odd pages of scribbles and a few ideas...and it all comes back to stories and, here, one old tragedy which I never knew the end of...if any of us did...and so, over coffees imbued with dreams and echoes of Wien, days spent walking, it was time to look for that story...the answers not to be found in India though, the only person I know who may know the ending is a couple of thousand miles away in Vietnam and some things deserve voice....so, maybe later in the year....

The story involves a friend, part of a group of us who were together in goa and Karnataka fifteen years ago...osho, zen and Kerouac, tarot cards and acid, motorbikes and full moons...in her case too much of everything... I'd left when it crashed, was wandering south having realised that the edge was not only precarious but behind me. Later, moving north again to the cave temples of Maharashtra, I stopped off in chapora (where I got really ill on a mackerel pilau and spent a week stuck there) and heard that she was wobbling. Later I heard that she'd gone north, gone crazy and had walked, naked, down the main street of someplace forgotten, pointing out dealers and taunting the local males....as I heard it someone found her parents and a couple of days later she was gone. I always wondered what happened next, where she ended up....

A twisted history here...