Passage to India

My Dad was born in Calcutta, now called Kolkata. His Dad, an English tea trader had shipped East from London where he met my Grandma, an Irish nurse who had a Florence Nightingale aura about her.  She would die young of breast cancer and many decades later my Aunty showed me photographs and told me stories about her which filled a gap in my family knowledge.  My Dad never mentioned his Mum, the pain of loosing a mother so young and being shunted off quickly thereafter to an English boarding school took its toll.  The blight of the English stiff upper lip.

Kolkata circa 1937, Grandpa seated in the middle, Grandma to the right.

Dad would grow up to follow his father into the tea trade, accepting a job in Colombo, Sri Lanka where he and his newly married British wife, my mother, ushered two girls into the world.  I learned early on through a succession of nannies who were fired at regular intervals, and by hanging out in the kitchen, that the staff did not have a great reverence for their employers' children.  One of the kitchen hands used to fix a clothes peg to my ear lobe and make me count to ten, in Sinhalese, before taking it off.  Ow!  Still, I never squealed.

Despite, or because of my early experiences and background I remained sceptical of the benefits colonisation brought to Sri Lanka and India.  I grew up listening to the forthright assertion that British rule was a blessing to third world countries, pulling the poor souls out of chaos and into a promised land of industrialisation and rule-making.  Never mind that they had their own rules and laws. 

In November I visited India for the first time, I was elated to finally visit a country I had heard so much about, and to form my own view of it unfiltered through the lenses of my family's reminiscing.  Arriving in Delhi with only one full day to spare, en route to Northern India I decided against the inevitable tourist frenzy at the Taj Mahal and opted to sightsee Old Delhi instead.  Standing in the courtyard at the Jama Masjid mosque I looked through the arches and saw The Red Fort, a stunning seventeenth century palace built on a scale that would challenge the fertile imaginations of The Game of Thrones producers.  Here was India.  Here too were the British.

Weaving through the traffic and market sellers which separate the Mosque from the Fort, my guide Bhupendra unravelled the long history of the Fort.  As we passed through the outside walls, no longer guarded by crocodiles hidden in the moats, yet requiring bag checks and a quick frisk as we entered, Bhupendra pointed out a number of ugly brick barracks which the British had built inside the Fort after an uprising in 1857.  These buildings were not only out of time, their functional design jarred with the exquisite palaces and gardens inside the Red Fort walls.  Looking at these barracks William Blake's hymn Jerusalem sounded in my ears. Written around the time the East India Company and the British Army were making significant inroads into India, I heard the hymn and rearranged the words: 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In other people's green and pleasant Lands.

My Grandpa would turn in his grave.

I'm photographed at the Jama Masjid mosque in Delhi, India's largest mosque with a courtyard capable of holding 25,000 people.

Wye?

I've never been a fan of Christmas Day, growing up in our family wasn't 'very merry', and this year I had rashly tweeted on Christmas Eve, at 10.03 PM, 'joy to the world! ~~ it's almost over for another year.' I wasn't to know that in less than 24 hours everything would be turned on it's head, a bushfire would sweep through Wye River where I own a property.  I would spend a large part of Christmas Day with my partners family in Sydney glued to my iPhone and the Fire Ready app in particular.  if you haven't got the Fire Ready app on your phone, load it now.

It was in the afternoon that the warnings started, with a sickening post Christmas lunch lurch I read that it was too late to leave Wye and Separation Creek, a smaller hamlet just over the hill from Wye.  The iconic Great Ocean Road was the only road into and out of town and it was now closed. The fire would burn right down to the beach, leaping over large sections of the road. By 10.30 at night the ABC predicted that a total of 60 houses had been lost.

By Boxing Day that number had risen to 116, 98 in Wye River and 18 in Separation Creek, or Sep as the locals call it.  I would wait over 24 hours before hearing that my house had miraculously survived, while others on the same street, more exposed to the bush, had burnt.  Other home owners would wait longer to hear the fate of their homes.  Twitter hashtags #vicfires and #wyereiver both a blessing, the source of unofficial confirmation, and a cause of more stomach lurching: one tweet from a local, 'Riverside got hit hard'.

During the days after the fire I spent an obsessive amount of time on my phone.  While mobile technology has gifted us with applications that literally save lives, that same technology has hatched a fixation in times of crisis on a live stream of comment, photographs and videos, calling out for own raw contributions to the feed.  TV seems, and is, staged in comparison.  My neighbour posted a photo on Instagram of his house on Christmas Day with the fire clearly visible over the rooftop; someone took a photo from the inside of their car as they left Wye with the fire closing in on Separation Creek, a dog's face in the passenger seat oddly reassuring; and Mashable Australia helpfully compiled some of the Christmas Day social media activity on one page.

The most important, and the most astounding outcome of the Christmas Day fire was that no one lost their lives.  There was no better news than that.  The house I've owned for less than a year and the first house I've ever purchased, made it.  I have cherished memories of the times I've spent at Wye River: the view from my deck 2 weeks before the fire; our dog Nero passed out in the sun on that deck;  a family lunch the last time we were all together at Wye in October; a drawing of the 'Wye Beastie', a whimsical offering from a friend, now framed and hanging in the spare room.

A house is more than its contents, a house brims with memories, with the times we've spent in it with family and friends.  In the ten months I've owned that house I've shared it with loved ones and holiday renters I've never met.   The previous owner who owned the property for 19 years asked me to look after 'her'.  Her.  As a Buddhist I had to remind myself as this tragedy unfolded, that this was a perfect example of attachment playing out.  But there is little relief in acknowledging that in a time of crisis, or in its aftermath.  Our attachment to home, to place, runs deep and quick.