Saturday 22nd December

It is not the end of the world after all!

We are all still here...

WHEW!!!!

We had a 4½ year old Work Experience Student at our office on Wednesday.  Jemima arrived with a backpack full of snacks and her portable DVD player.  I set her up with drawing and colouring equipment next to me at my big desk and asked if she would like to watch a move.  Oh no thanks; she was there to WORK!

Later that day she went to play with her cousins.  Katy heard Eva and Jemima arguing vehemently:

I am

No I am

No I am

No I am

Until finally Eva gave up and said, “OK Jemima, we can BOTH be trapped in the burning building!”

Burning building??  Where did that come from? 

India #49

On our trip from Jabalpur to Varanasi our train was very crowded.  No more lolling about on two window seats each!  There were no spare seats at all, and all three sleepers were unfurled, one above the other.  In the bunk opposite me was a mother with two children, all curled up neatly, sleeping soundly, while I wriggled and complained gently to myself.

We had been told to watch our possessions very carefully.  This part of the train trip is apparently riddled with thieves.  We gave in and bought chains from a hawker patrolling the carriages, and then laboriously chained all of our bags together under one seat.  Our personal and important things, such as money, visacards, passports, were stashed under our heads.  Vish appointed himself Guardian of the Compartment and he spent a very uncomfortable night sitting up with his head on one side – when all three bunks are up there is no headroom in the seats.  Poor Vish!  He is, however, human, and he did eventually doze off.  I got up in the middle of the night (whinge whinge) to wander up and down the carriage, full of zzzz and snore and grunt and sigh, with limbs outflung in the passageway.  I negotiated my way quietly along, then turned to look back down the compartment – I knew someone was looking at me.  And there, outlined in the dim light, was a little boy, about nine years old, dressed in dingy khaki shorts and shirt, squat, slightly dishevelled.  Definitely a little thief!  I stared at him thoughtfully, then thought, well I’m not going to wake everyone in the carriage just to catch this poor little kid.  If there is anything loose and available, let him have it, surely everyone has their precious things tucked up under their heads anyway.  But I did start to walk back up the carriage, I am not quite so laissez-faire and to let him steal the toiletries out of the top of my pack, for instance… Whatever would I do without my disinfectant handwashing stuff??  I walked all the way to the other end and looked in every compartment – not a sign of the little thiefboy!  He had completely vanished, melted into the dark, but where?  Maybe he was hiding under a seat; I will never know.

I really didn’t sleep much on this part of the trip.  I kept having to get up and s-t-r-e-t-c-h, which wasn’t all that easy because our carriage was so very crowded.  I had a mother with two little boys crowded onto the bunk near me – dear little boys called Ojus and Tajus.  Before they all curled up on their narrow hard bunk their proud mother got Ojus to write words for me.  He was only about 4 but he could write his name, and C-A-T, and T-R-A-I-N – all sorts of extraordinary things.  I think he attended a very rigid learn-by-rote school.  Mary and I admired his skill but I know we were both thinking how much happier he would be learning somewhere like her Bellerive Cottage School…

In the very middle of the night I got up to stretch along the passageway again.  There is a bit of space outside the toilets, where I tried to restore some sort of normality to various limbs.  Two very big tall soldiers with huge guns came up and told me, in no uncertain terms, to GO BACK TO BED.  So…I did!  (I didn’t tell them about the little thief I had seen earlier in the night…)