Knock, knock, knock

Every time I go to the Palace Museum (and that’s at least twice a day) I see the same two little girls. I think they’re one of the sweepers daughters, but I can't be sure. I also saw them with a stable hand. Horses incidentally, are stabled in the square below the sculpture gallery. The girls greet me and run off giggling. But as they’ve become more familiar, so they get bolder. Today they asked me for ‘pen’. I hauled out one of the hotel freebies, the Imperial no less, and gave it the older one. She then came rushing back and asked me for another for her sister. The little girl is so tiny and so thin I just want to pick her up and squeeze her. So I rushed back to my room to find another. In exchange they posed for a photo. This afternoon they asked for chocolate. I might take them asome of the chocolates that are laid on my bed each evening, although they may melt on the way there. Perhaps I'll take an apple.

Now I don’t want to curse the muse - spit three times, knock on wood, and then again – but I feel comfortable with the direction the work is taking. I somehow feel that I’m getting more of a synthesis between spoken English-English and spoken Indian-English, without compromising either. But as I say knock on wood and spit three times. The client is yet to see it. I may have to start all over again. Knock, knock, knock, knock, KNOCK!

BBC served me well last night. I watched a documentary on the artist Howard Hodgkin visiting Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi. A place that’s thought to be a precursor to the Taj Mahal. He just sat there, and sat, and sat. The sitting, he said, was working. He was feeling a painting coming on. He talked about India as being a pluralistic world where all good things can happen. It then cut to Hodgkins on a boat in the Mumbai harbour watching a the sun disappear on the misty horizon. They showed a painting of his called ‘Bombay Sunset’. He described a sunset as “a remarkable happening” and commented that, “All good things come to an end, and start afresh, afresh, afresh…”

I remember writing about one of his paintings for the National Gallery of Victoria. It was called ‘Night and Day’, named after the Cole Porter song. I remember working the burning, yearning, churning lyrics of the song into the description, which the curator utterly rejected. It’s strange how you have a way of remembering the arguments you lose even though you know you were right. But, as Frank Sinatra so nonchalantly sings, That’s Life.

And then the BBC took me into the dark world of the secret prisons operated by the CIA in Romania, Poland, Uzbekistan and Morocco. From life affirming to rights denying. I can hear Zac calling me a lefty pinko hippie, but the country that leads the charge in brave and free who talks such an excellent democracy game is showing a horrifyingly ugly side where rule of law is simply rhetoric.

All we can do in our own little way is show small acts of kindness. Come to think of it, I suspect I’m killing my plants outside with too much kindness. Maybe a whole lot of water is not that healthy for plants that have adapted to daily temperatures of 45 degrees. The ‘soil’ is looking more like clogged clay every day. I think I’ll forget my good intentions and focus all my energy on nurturing my script.