A Foot in Both Camps

An ‘embroidered memoir’,  A Foot in Both Camps is a volume of nine short stories created around two central characters; one, a youngish Englishman, and t’other a young Indian girl. Brought together, in a situation that might, just, be real, in part at least.

It tracks cultures, families, faith and the two societies as they interact in India and the UK; the first of which is …

 

Chapter Extract:

The Bone Breakers:  Extract

“One, two ……. Three, four ……….five ……………………..?“ He was conscious of how carefully she counted their numbers as the powerful glasses swept the area between the tips of the mountains and the upper slopes. It was there that the birds could usually be seen riding the warm currents of air washing off the crescent of Himalayan slopes that contain the jewel hidden below; the Kulu Valley.

For him, India had been the hope of finding new values and renewing his spirit but these creatures served to remind him that much of what he had seen since his arrival, had been a façade. Though often glorious in the expression, the harmony and spiritual content of, both, people and places had proved, too often upon close examination, to be but a cruel illusion.

Yes, these birds were masters of their environment; positioning themselves with imperial ease by each tiny movement of a wing or a tail feather as they played aerial chequers across an azure blue sky. Their very presence in the clear air cast sinister shadows on the ground below as they flitted like ghosts over the countryside. As in the epics so evocative of the Indian condition – the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, each an Indian classic about the endless orbit of death and renewal – so did these creatures dance across the sky. Nature had costumed them with the dignity and stark beauty of the predator but ‘the lines’ they had been given were those of the scavenger. Though magnificently attired as warriors of the skies, some perverse playwright had condemned them to live on the scraps left by lesser creatures.

Yes, he had come to understand that, in modern India, even the glory that was the Lammergeyer was but a part of an ornithological fraud that was, in and of itself, perhaps, symbolic of a greater deception. India had become for him a re-enactment of Wassilissa meeting Baba-Yaga in which nature, great beauty, and great evil, being unable to prevail each over the other, leave the story in exquisite, if precarious balance, for all eternity.

The tiny hands holding the huge binoculars pulled the long lens away from the bright, obsidian orbs of her eyes and looked towards Michael with deep concern etched into her young face.  “Where is he…?  What has happened, Michaelji?”

“I don’t know Mohini; how long is it now since we last saw him?”  It was not a question the World Wildlife Fund’s Project Director for the translocation of the Lammergeyers to the Himachal province of north India needed to ask for himself.  But his small companion was clearly as troubled by the protracted absence of the bird – NWP006 – as he had been since it first dropped off his project’s radar. Anticipating the worst, he wanted to lead her gently to the acceptance of that which he already feared was true.

The realisation of how much he had come to care for this child, how fond he had become of the amazing diminutive creature she was – dark skin, huge eyes, face like a doe and alert as a kingfisher –  had taken him by surprise. He no longer had a wife or children in his life and had, consequently,  chosen a line of work that brought him to places of isolation and had done so because he had come to love solitude. He used it as a blanket for the chill in his soul; yet there was so much about this young girl – her vibrancy, her quick bright mind – that had reached him in ways he had not thought still possible. There was nothing that did not interest her or catch her enthusiasm or attention and, in her naivety and innocence, she seemed as much a part of nature as an observer of its wonders.

Without ceasing to scan the scene unaided by the binoculars, she placed the glasses in his outstretched hand; waiting in silence with bated breath as, in turn, he panned across the lower slopes. A movement caught his eye, the fluttering of a wing ….  He looked hard but saw only the wingtips of a turkey vulture.  Then he noticed there were other scavengers some of which were lying prone, ugly and ungainly still but … that was it, they were still, there was no movement.  The complete lack of movement amongst a flock of birds that were normally never still was surely a harbinger of nothing good.

The path from their grandly named “hide” was steep and it took almost two hours to cross the valley – traversing the wildly racing tributary of the Sutlej over the bridge. The sound of their footsteps rebounded from its surface as it leapt up and down with the weight of their joint crossing.  Then, they progressed along the roads, tracks really, that wound between the houses and ramshackle buildings with dusty awnings and small verandas that, in this village, passed for shops.  Traditionally, homes and barns here are in the same building, fashioned in wood and rock on two stories with the pens for the cattle on the ground floor. An arrangement that was especially good in the harsh winters; the animals’ heat would permeate upwards to impregnate the family areas above and add the rich, earthy scent of cattle; a natural combination that helped disguise the cold and snow that closed the passes and freezes the ground hard…..