THE MISSING WORLD

My father's desk was always magic. There was stuff there that when I was a child seemed mysterious, adult, and exotic. From another world. Definitely from another time. It stood in a corner of the upstairs living room, diagonally opposite my brother's desk where the globe on a stand weighed down textbooks, away from the sunlight which hit the main area and that latter desk during most of the day.

There was drafting equipment and a microscope there. And fountain pens. And pipes.

I have some of his pens and drafting equipment. Not the microscope.

I do not know what happened to the globe.

Or to the world.


Actually, I do know what has happened to the world. It is now filled with ghastly South-Indians who wish to tell me about, in great insistently boring detail, their wonderful funeral plans for people like me, OR changes in end-of-life-insurance for old geezers, OR amendments to medicare part A and part B, or extended warranties, air duct servicing, the fraternal order of the police and toys for children who have cancer and no hair, and why my computer is acting slow tech support donations virus scans banking and podiatry. Kindly shut up ji and go away. Within a few decades they'll form a caste of their own, surnamed Peskitelaifunwallah, and arrange fabulous over-the-top festivals, where a whole bunch of desi uncles in pajama-kurta will overindulge in rosgullahs, laddoos, badam barfis, and mithai with pista and kesram and edible gold foil which will increase the incidence of middle-aged gout, diabetes, obesity, and chronic indigestion, while getting mildly tiddly on Amrut Scotch. Please get off the damned phone and have some masala munch and kakori. Drink some overly sweetened chai.

Over dozen calls since I got up. No one I want to hear from.
I am now abundantly familiar with desi accents.
Which I did not wish to be.


There was no telephone in our house when I was growing up. There did not need to be one there. People were not so dependent on inane conversations with their nearest and dearest, finding out when the bus to Eindhoven would leave, or hearing from desi phone wallahs.
India was very much further away. No one really paid attention to them.

Instead, we "borrowed" our dad's smoking equipment (one of various Comoy or Peterson pipes), grabbed the fresh tin of Balkan Sobranie or Dunhill 965 which we'd bought from the tobacconist close to the highschool a day or two ago, and bicycled out to the Malpy Fens to spend a quiet afternoon in the swamp reading a good book. Something adventurous.

Righ around four thirty I'd head home to make a pot of strong tea.


Spend the evening after dinner doing homework while listening to music on the Victrola, then go downstairs to read all about Cortez and Aztecs or the Middle Ages, with more tea and another pipeful or two. Francisco Pizarro and the conquest of Peru.
The empire of the Ashanti and their golden stools.



I only borrowed my father's pipes a few times, mostly I smoked my own. Several of which came from that tobacconist nearer the high school. Dad gave me all his pipes eventually, the year he passed. They remind me of Holland, Indian and Indonesian food, and the boggy area stretching to the Belgian border. Sometimes I also pull out the drafting equipment to smell it. The old style hard alloys have a fragrance.




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