In Bangalore, I used to walk to the local Indian school, St. Anthony’s Boy’s School. Sometimes I took a rickshaw. The driver would be peddling on the street and I would wave him down. It was cheap and I had enough pocket money. I thought school was thorough and complete meaning subjects were covered thoroughly and completely without any gaps or holes. But when I went on to a British school in Bangalore I discovered there were holes in what I had been taught. It didn’t matter. I just loved learning and reading. Given that my father ran a library there were plenty of books at my disposal. My parents were open to me reading anything. There were no PTA (parent teacher association) meetings. No judgements. My father probably gave me the most books on all sorts of subjects.
The dachshund would meet me when I walked home from school. My general routine after returning home was to put on outdoor clothes and go climb a tree. There were not so many other kids around. Sometimes a few. We lived on Richmond Road, a street with lots of bungalows. White people generally lived in these bungalows, mostly Brits. They worked for the state I guess maybe civil servants.
after first communion
My dad had a jeep as part of his job. On Sundays we would drive to mass at the Catholic church. I remember the building as spacious. Sometimes he would drive me to the library where he worked. That seemed spacious to me too. Everything seemed spacious to me back then. Even our bungalow.
I remember the bungalow had a veranda. I remember lots of plants on ours planted by the gardener and by my dad as well. My father liked to garden growing all kinds of plants edible and not. I remember everything from African violets to basil.
In addition to the dachshund and siamese cat, he owned parakeets. About four or five blue parakeets in a green cage. He also kept fish in a standard fish bowl. They were just plain old fish not very interesting to me. He also kept two horses. He loved animals. He’d grown up on a farm in Nebraska.
I fell from a mango tree and my dad looked at my arm and decided it was broken and took me to the doctor. I also fell while climbing a wall. A piece of the wall broke off in my hand and that’s how I fell. A stranger, an Indian man, picked me up and took me up to the house. Broke my arm that time too catching myself with my hand and elbow beneath me. But aside from events like this I felt safe and happy in Bangalore.
I enjoyed the food. My first glass of water there I drank not realizing there were peppercorns in the glass. Overall the food was not spicy. We had a cook. He would make me fried chicken. When my father was entertaining he would take over the kitchen. He greatly enjoyed cooking. From him I learned how to make pesto. He was a good cook.
My younger sister had been born in Italy. My mother had her hands full with me, a baby and my father and all our animals. She was very beautiful and always smelled nice. Like flowers.
We were there from 1957 to 1962. My father worked as a librarian for the U.S. State Department. I was five years old when we arrived and I could still speak Italian from his previous post in Genoa, Italy. I had great pets in India. My father had a dachshund. A long skinny regular sized dachshund not a miniature. He also had a Siamese cat that he had brought from Italy. In addition I had a young mongoose. His name was Mongi. My father purchased him from a snake charmer. I most remember how he used to run up the sleeve of my shirt. I first saw him when the snake charmer came to visit our bungalow. He took him out of a bag and put him on the ground. He ran up to the snake and sniffed. The snake had come out of the bushes around our place. I think it was a cobra. The mongoose ignored the snake for a bit and sniffed all of the hands and feets he could find before returning to the snake. The snake charmer held a bag open and the mongoose ran back inside. The snake charmer picked up the snake very carefully and placed the snake in a different bag. The snake charmer, who probably saw my face filled with delight, made my father an offer. In exchange for a 5 rupee note, maybe about a $1, my father bought me the mongoose.
sitting on the steps of the bungalow book in hand
Over time I had more than one mongoose though only one at a time. The first Mongi got too used to people and got too close to someone cutting grass with a sickle and was killed. The snake charmers visited the house once a week and they always had a mongoose for sale. I remember my father reading Kipling’s Riki Tiki Tavi to me. In the end I think I had two or three mongoose before we left India for the U.S. before embarking for Austria. They were all killed by the sickle because the men wielding the sickle sat in the grass looking very inviting and the mongoose would get too close. The last Mongi I had to leave behind because he was not allowed to enter the U.S. I felt like he was being unfairly blamed for killing chickens when he’d never killed a chicken in his life.
They are about as big as a gray squirrel. Our Siamese cat liked to carry them around in its mouth and treated them like kittens. The dachshund also liked to pick them up and carry them around by the waist. The trio got along fine even when a new Mongi appeared. They liked to sleep together and with me. When the Ayah put me to bed, she covered my bed with mosquito netting. The mongoose would wait and unstuff the net where it was tucked underneath the mattress and slip into bed with me. We kept him fed fairly well with leftovers from the table and bits of chicken. They could come and go as they pleased in and out of the house and into any bedroom. My mother thought me and my father were nuts but she bore with it. The family gardeners liked them because they killed the snakes that the gardeners chanced upon.
My mother had a harder time dealing with the goats. They weren’t pets. They were more of a nuisance. We kept a few in the compound. They were kept for their meat and had free range to wander wherever liked. I rarely messed with them because they would butt fiercely with their heads. Sometimes they wandered into the house. They’d walk right through the screen door by butting the screen out. They usually made their way to the couch and fell asleep. I think they thought they were people.
The most common animal I saw in India were monkeys. There were several mango trees in the compound. The monkeys infested the trees. Rheesus monkeys. They made a chittering sound. They ate the mangoes and also threw them to the ground. I liked to climb the mango trees to pick mangoes and just eat them fresh. I still like the taste of fresh mangoes.
They seemed a complete and utter indulgence when I purchased the bouquet last summer. The vendor at the Farmers Market had seen me eyeing them all day and knew he just had to bide his time.
I have to say so many months later it was a very worthwhile investment. I had Steve string them up so we could hang on an interior door.
I’m going to see if I can grow my own this year. We’ll see.
I can’t quite remember how Steve and I first met Jim and Lily his beagle. It was during the pandemic. Perhaps as we walked past his house and he was outside tinkering on his car. A seemingly forever project for him. A connection was made somehow and he came to our aid many a time unasked. There was a host of electrical work which made sense given that that was his profession. But then there were those other things like the time I texted him to ask if he might stop by the house to help Steve finish baking some bread. Jim was a strong fellow who could lift the heavy mixer and things that Steve could not do. And then there was the time I called Jim from the back of a taxi. Steve and I had just left the ER and I feared an exhausted Steve could not make it up the spiral staircase. In the end it took more than Jim to get Steve up the stairs but he was there, a companion, along on the journey. As he lost weight, I knew he was ill and then became still more ill. One day I did ask him, why are you helping Steve so much? He replied with that sparkle in his eyes, I’ve done a lot of things in this life that I need to account for by giving back. When I walked by his house months ago and saw people clearing things out I hoped that he was safe somewhere with family. I have recently thought about him often especially on recent Monday mornings as I look out the window at the curb, then sigh, and struggle to bundle up, take out the trash and/or recycling and then drag the dumpsters to the curb before the city trucks go by. When Jim was walking Lily on a Sunday evening he would often drag out the dumpsters. He not only looked out for Steve. I don’t know why I did it last night but I did. I looked him up and found what I was expecting to see some day. His obituary as written by his loving family. I am grateful to have made his acquaintance. https://www.dohertyfuneralservice.com/obituary/james-cafferky-jr
Pansies, lavender, lemon verbena, a bit of basil and some marigolds … the containers on the patio grew a bit wonderfully wild. The pollinators and birds don’t mind. This upcoming weekend I’ll try to clean things up a bit and then make a plan for trying my hand at growing pansies from seed for the fall. We’ll see!
In the spring the plant is green with golden flowers and by the summertime the flowers fade and you see these glassine leaves with the seeds inside. To be honest it wasn’t until I zoomed in with my camera this year that I noticed the seeds. I think various creatures are enjoying them but I might save a few seeds this year.
Echinacea grows in three different spots in the yard. The bunnies mowed down one patch but have not touched the other two as far as I can tell. Finicky eaters!
… it is trying to take over the yard. I thought keeping this perennial in a container would help contain it. Nope. After three years, it’s roots have gone down deep into the earth and there are little mini versions of the plant all over the yard, primarily along the edges. I must say the pollinators do love it. 🙂
Words + Images 