Tree #5: A frangipani tree in Bangalore, India

My friend Priya the artist has planted me a frangipani tree. She tells me that it will have beautiful pink and yellow flowers and promises me more pictures when it does. But for starters, here is its baby-pic.

Tree #4: A neem tree in Udupi, India

This tree is Zinan's! She's Ashraf and Zeenat's daughter (see previous "Plant Me A Tree" post). I'm quite excited about this tree because neem trees are supposed to be very healing - not just in their byproducts - but in their very presence. They heal the air around them. What a lovely thought.

Zinan is 11 years old now. She's a very talented artist (it's in the Tonse genes, honestly!) and I'm going to ask her if she'll draw or paint the tree for me, instead of the usual photo. She misses her brother, I know. Although he was older, I'd often think of them as twins, they were so close to each other. There must be a big empty space in her life now. I'm glad she planted a neem tree, I hope it sends some healing air her way. Breathe deep, sweetie.

Tree #3: A nutmeg tree in Udupi, India

People, you're supposed to TELL me when you plant the trees. I don't actually have psychic vibes and telephathic connections with them. (Well, not yet).

Anyway I'm happy to report, thanks to my bhabhi Zeenat's casual mention yesterday that they'd planted two trees for me a while back in Udupi - that I now require just .. oh .. 38 more .. sigh.

Zeenat is my dear cousin Ashraf Bhai's wife, and they are down here for a holiday with their daughter Zinan (Tree #4 is her contribution by the way). Zeenat is also Mehran's mother. Some of you may remember that sweet bright and unbelievably cheerful little boy who was here in Bangalore with us two years ago for his cancer treatment. He passed away last October.

This sums it up.

“If velvet could speak, it would sound like Rickman.”

- Sandy Bauers, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Cigarette:

Another one of those scratched-out poems, that I wrote a year after the last one. Kind of forlorn and bitter.

Virgin white with burning tip
Glows with passion at my lips
In go my hopes
And out my dreams in a
puff of smoke.
Watch flecks of time drift
away
And faces form and fade
Then crush, and crush
beyond recognition
And leave it
forgotten in its black ash
graveyard.

(Written at 4.53 pm 1st June 1988)

Return of the red-nosed.

At long last .. Gladys has returned from an extremely lengthy tea party with the Queen (she could have pinched an ashtray from Buckingham Palace for me but no, all she did was stick that red nose on and take up where she left off).

The voice is not better, actually - still gives me trouble from time to time and I do need to go on one of those silent treatments again, but I have too much to say! So for now, I'm just carrying on. But I will do my best to keep Gladys from jabbering as much as she usually does. We shall see. She tends to get carried away and forgot all about my poor vocal chords.

But she is all set to start working again and I can't bear to deprive her (and the world) of her delightful presence. So this weekend sees the start of a new assignment. I shall be driving Gladys and Miss Rose down to the paediatric ward of a cancer hospital this Saturday. They are both very excited and a bit nervous too. Clowning in the paediatric ward of a general hospital is one thing, where the faces are different every time you visit. At a cancer hospital, we'll be seeing patients who are in for longer stretches of time. We'll get to know them, and probably love them. And not all of them will make it.

I wonder if clowns cry.