The year I crossed the mountain
While it’s still January, let me say this about 2010. It wasn’t a happy year: loss ran through it right to the end. Mostly other people’s losses, but the kind that undermine faith and hope. That being said, it was the year I fell in love – twice.
The first time I lost my heart, it was the spectacular, leg-buckling kind that happens without warning, soaking everything in glory. I got on a plane, flew east, and got off at Mumbai. Incense was burning at the customs desk, next to a little plastic model of Ganesh. My knees gave a little preparatory wobble. The next day, just before dawn, I dragged open the curtains in our room of faded gentility at the India International Centre, eager to see what Delhi looked like by daylight. The sky was the same colour as the sandstone the Mughal emperors and Lutyens fancied for their monumental buildings, and as the heavy curtains swished aside, all the leaves on the tree outside the window took flight, resolving into green and turquoise parakeets.
So you could say that India had me at “hello”. I’m still trying to write about the tiny slice of India (Delhi and Agra) and Indian life I encountered in two short weeks, and I’m still failing. One reason it’s so hard to describe is because everything encountered with any of the senses – sight, smell, sound, taste and touch – is amplified. Whether it’s heat, dust, food, drink, fabric, colour, ancient buildings and tombs, new industries, the sights and smells of poverty, infrastructure that seems held together by string and prayer, cricket, traffic, temples, gods – all these things, no matter how prosaic, seem to be on sensory steroids. Except for the people, who I mostly found to be gentle, patient, courteous and pragmatic.
I walked through my Indian days in a state of blissed-out radiance. While those around me got sick, I was no doubt infuriatingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It helped that the intense dry heat acted as an instant cure for the chronic pain that nags at me – although not as dramatically as it does Dr House – the respite was bliss.
How did I get onto this magic carpet in the first place? Elinor Sisulu took me along in her capacity as a Commonwealth Prize judge. I have no idea what I have done to deserve such a wonderful and generous friend. A thousand thousand thank-yous to Elinor, her fellow judges, the Dhal and Mukherjee families, and the Commonwealth Foundation for making me so welcome.
Oh, the horror of the return to the dark and cramped flat I was temporarily occupying while hunting for somewhere to live. I yearned like a bereft lover: lying awake at night replaying Indian scenes, reading subcontinental writers, drinking buckets of chai, fingering my new fabrics… for months, memories would ambush me, making my eyes sting.
However, I did have a grand distraction: the Not The London Book Fair. Remember the volcano that clipped wings all over the North Atlantic? South African writers lost their chance to shine at the London Book Fair, and so Ben-editor and Mervyn “Book Lounge” Sloman rustled up a fabulous party in its place. It was a treat to hear writers like Antjie Krog and Imraan Coovadia read, to listen to path-breakers like Victor Dlamini and Arthur Attwell, and to catch up with sisters-in-writing Ingrid Anderson and Fifi Snyckers, among others.
Next, I really did have to find a decent home for myself and The Girls. I had been looking (first to buy, then to rent) for eight months when I idly clicked on a few Noordhoek ads on Gumtree at 2.30 in the morning, after meeting a deadline, too wired to go to sleep. To cut a very long story short, I ended up being shown a cottage on De Goede Hoop estate, a leafy oasis of huge properties no doubt skewing the Gini coefficient. The second I saw the location, the cottage and its white-walled garden, I knew I was staring at the potential Love of My Life. I flung myself first at the agent’s feet, then my soon-to-be landlady’s. And so began Love Affair No. 2.
Moving after thirty years in the southern suburbs of Cape Town to the other side of the mountain, 40 kms in distance from everything familiar, was a huge upheaval. Changing neighbourhoods is like remarrying: all your daily rituals and habits have to change too. The first time I had a minor medical emergency late one night, I panicked at the realisation that I had no idea where to go or who to call for help. (Idiot me: all I had to do was ring Sarah.) Because I’m renting, I felt horribly insecure at first, afraid I’d be booted out again. Then there were those who clicked their tongues, who worried that I’d suffer from the isolation – someone even muttered about the corrupting proximity of so much wealth.
Any worries I had about isolation melted long ago. My farm childhood has come flooding back to me as I’ve sunk into a semi-pastoral and green (mostly vegetarian) life. The satisfaction of cutting out meat, planting my own herbs and veggies, tending a garden with the seasons (winter means mulching, spring planting and weeding, summer pruning, watering and harvesting) suffuses my days, to the extent that I can hardly bear to leave my little Arcadia. Seeing clients and doing chores back on my old turf, I find myself yearning for my new home, for the long streak of ruffled blue and turquoise that marks the sea horizon as I come down Silvermine Road, the mountain peaks that curl loosely over and around me, the coolness of my steeple-roofed cottage, the scents of the garden after I’ve watered it, the gauze of the Milky Way at night, the welcome I get from the world’s two happiest and healthiest kitties.
I love pottering round the neighbourhood, buying bread and veggies from bakeries and farmers’ stalls rather than supermarkets (Noordhoek must be one of the best places to be a locavore in the world), poking round nurseries, visiting places (like the Kommetjie lighthouse and the Simonstown Naval Museum) I’ve always meant to check out. I love the beach, carnivalesque in summer and on weekends, a calm cobweb-clearing space on winter weekdays.
But most of all, I like it right here at home. I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure from discovering porcupine quills in the garden, the boastful noises when one of the hens lays an egg, a salad made entirely from the contents of my own kitchen garden, discovering what “fresh” really means in terms of taste. Best of all is the golden (or pink or tangerine or smudged lilac or grey or gaudy coral, depending on the weather and the sun) hour when I take the girls for our daily wander around the premises. They chase each other up and down trees, they hide behind bushes and pounce out at me, they sniff and explore and roll, and they give me immense joy. Then they get supper and milk, and Mommy gets a glass of wine while watching the evening stars come out.
I fear sounding smug, but tell myself this blissful state of absorption is normal for newly-weds. I’m not only married to my new life here, but still on honeymoon. No Paradise is without serpents (literally in our case – a boomslang was spotted in the woodpile last week); but for now I’m trying not to second-guess my amazing good fortune, and to be properly grateful for it. Being in love means living in the moment, so I’m trying to do just that. And hoping that at some stage, it feeds into my writing.
