I(n)diosynchronicities

All is not lost: Bangalore may return to its former green glory. Despite the newly arrived monsoon, which will probably wreak havoc with the environment and traffic, the majority of residents (57%) have voted for the replanting of trees before the restoration of roads (only 14%). Fiat arbores. Jeunesse Park would approve.
Here in suburban Kaapstad, we’re in the throes of a wet winter, the greenies have disallowed city planners from cutting away the precious mountain to widen the road, and the parochials are miffed.
Their point is that exhaust fumes of ever-increasing volumes of traffic will ultimately cause more damage to the planet. The greenies have bowed and agreed to loan them a bit of the mountain while they broaden the island in the centre.
Nothing like living in India to make one observant. Miss it already. And hope I get to sail a tuk tuk through the flooded streets.

There must be better times for coming home. If indeed, home it is, I am reminded again, after watching an aeroplane video of Nelson Mandela’s incarceration.
Flying over the straits of Ormuz (after which our most enigmatic slave ancestress of probably tens of thousands of pale faces, Armosyn, was named) via Dubai, I managed to objectify the xenophobic necklacing by locals of African refugees and see the big ugly picture. Arabs have been trading humans for centuries, Africans have been escaping Arabs and each other for longer, Europeans trying to colonise the whole lot.
And South Africans, like modern Indians, have been trying to find their roots and unify the mengelmoes ever since. So sweet, so clear, so easy when you’re far away and pining for fresh air and quiet, familiar streets. And yes, again and again, I think how sanguinely lucky I am to have been born in South Africa with a silver-plated spoon in my white mouth. But I don’t know if I can call it home now any more than I did 20 years’ ago when I returned from a year overseas, guilt-wracked and shunned by the world prior to the great Madiba’s release.
More tragically, I don’t know if the father, or brethren, sisters or mothers or whoever it is that decreed we are family, in a political as opposed to genetic, sense even want me any more. Unless, of course, they favour a boarding school upbringing, and prefer me with a finger on my lips when I cry because my parents have divorced after years of sustained pretension of union because their idealistic love child, born of ideals, grows more trees. With arsenic in their almond centre, should a hedge be required.