East meets West Wales

I made a quick visit to the beach and there I was delighted to find Felix and Anu who I haven't seen for ages. Felix has a cottage up in the hllls but spends most of his time in India where he is an academic and an environmental activist. It was while he was doing research in Orissa that he met Anu, a teacher and now mother of their son. Theirs was a long and complicated courtship concluding in a traditional Indian wedding in a remote rural village, attended by two very different sets of relatives. Felix's sister, Ruth Padel, wrote a touching poem about her elderly mother's determination to get to the ceremony. It goes like this.

You, Shiva, and My Mum

Shall I tell how she went to India
At the age of eighty
For a week in the monsoon

Because her last unmarried son
Was getting married to a girl
With a mask of yellow turmeric on her face

At the shrine of Maa Markoma
In the forest where Orissa's last
Recorded human sacrifice took place?

How this mother of mine rode a motorbike,
Pillion, up a leopard-and-leeches path
Through jungle at full moon,

Getting off to shove away
The sleeping buffalo,
Puddled shaves of sacred calf?

How she who hates all frills
Watched her feet painted scarlet henna,
Flip-flop pattern between the toes

And backward swastikas at heel, without a murmur?
How she climbed barefoot to Shiva 
Up a rockslide - where God sat

Cross-legged, navy blue,
On a boulder above his cave,
One hand forbidding anyone impure,

Or wearing leather, to come in?
How she forded Cobra River
In a hundred degrees at noon

To reach the God's familiar - his little bull of stone
A pinky blaze of ribbons, bells, hibiscus - 
And lifelong sceptic that she is,

The eyes of all the valley on her - Tribal, Hindu,
Atheist and Christian - bowed? Shall I tell how you
Laughed fondly at me for my pride

In her? How I wait on the miracle 
Of your breath in my ear? Shall I tell 
Them? Yes. Tell that.