Story Time

I have not been to this familiar place before. It is the first time I have been beckoned by these rows of summer trees, telling me to walk between them to Faygate and not stray from the firm path beneath my feet. If a tree were to fall with no one present, (and lost in the green light with the baby asleep, I feel like we are not) would it make a sound? If a clock were to tick, would time pass? The birds are singing and insects are buzzing but time is not passing.

This countryside I know so well is new to me. Here is Beau Peep House: red door, four windows, chimney, symmetry; here is a leafy den: smoothed ground, a plank for a bench and a tree for climbing; here is a lane sickly sweet with elderflower and venomous with nettles. This is England's countryside in summer. I am sharing childhood memories with my baby in a place I have never been. I wonder if, one day far away, in a dustier, drier land, my son will know, as I once knew in India, that there was once also this place.

For a moment, trees part and allow us to see a cottage: green gables, a pond with a duck, a swing hung from a tree and I know what the time is. I have suddenly walked to childhood, to the settings of story-time. I have visited before. Indeed, I have lived here for many stories.

Cherry Tree Playing Fields

The baby isn't sleeping so I take him for a walk past Cherry Tree Playing Fields to the bmx track. Some boys are grouped at the start of the course - thirteen, fourteen and fifteen year olds - straddling their bikes, helmets on, but straps hanging limp. Apparently the brother of someone they know goes to mosque. "Did you call him a baby?" one of them asks another. "No, man, Albanian." And having confirmed that, he swoops down and leans low over his handle bars to take the high incline. He is determined; lean and mean. When he comes back his mates are watching another group of boys, slow pedestrians and, it has to be noted, of darker skin. The bmx boys call out in mock Arabic and then, pumped for a fight, take on the course with kick-butt wheelies and sharp swerves. Back at the base, "What does qasm illahi  mean anyway?"
"I told you, I don't know Albanian."
I swear to God I want to tell them. And some other things too.

I hope the man washing his car in the drive doesn't think I'm smiling at him simply because his house bears the sticker, 'Smile, You're on CCTV'. No, I'm smiling because I love his family. I have not met them, it has to be said, but Janice next door told me all about them. Once, after drinking a cuppa soup, she described the festival food they used to bring round: meat biriyani, phulke and gulab jamuns, the words filling her mouth, popping like pakore. In the white of her room, she loved the colours they wore and whenever she talked about them, she took thin air between her fingers and thumb to stroke georgettes, chiffons and silks. One scarf she mentioned on several occasions: dark blue velvet embroidered with silver sequins. Perhaps she saw the heavens in it.
I wonder if his family takes trays round to whoever lives next door now.

The cricketers who had been marking out the field when we passed them earlier are now all kneeling in a row, in a line that springs from the neat parallels of their pitch at a quirky tangent. It is as if they have abandoned their wickets and stumps for a different game altogether. But they are serious as they gaze beyond Cherry Tree Playing Fields, beyond Crawley to far away Mecca before lowering their heads, humble, to the ground.

The baby stirs and wakes. With bmx bikes, birds and boughs of blossom swooping around like this; with millions of men rising and falling; with whole universes spangled on scarves, there is such a lot of world to see.

An Equal Light

These blue skies of spring, tempered by a dusty softness where they meet the earth, are the skies of everywhere. At these middle times when we all face the sun the same, Crawley is Anywhereabad. Every town and village catches its breath, balanced briefly with equal days and equal nights, before the earth tilts them headlong into summer, or, I hear but hardly believe, winter in the south. And so, this West Sussex sky with with a greyed and dusky light glowing on the rendering and brickwork takes me everywhere I've ever been in spring under this same sun. Though I am not yet in Donne's New Heaven and New Earth, with 'neither darkness nor dazzling', there are at times glimpses of his 'equal light'. I am a mid-semester school girl faraway; I am at altitude and I am in cities; I am north, I am south and now I am here. This is Crawley, England, the World.

Our son knows Crawley best by these skies he looks up at laid in his buggy as well as by the minute topography of its streets: the tree roots jutting out of baked mud paths that bump his wheels; the flint chips mixed into concrete that jiggle him like a rattle; tarmac he glides over like a VIP or flagstones laid with precision and post-war civic pride. Travelling over these his buggy becomes the sleeper train - juggedy jug, juggedy jug - that lulled me to sleep as a child. And if a baby dreams his mother's memories, he is carried through the Shivalik Hills, into jungles, over the Yamuna bridge into the Old City and then out across the Deccan.

First Spring

Our son has traveled a lot. He has gone up and down the lengths of Langley Walk and
Langley Lane several times and crossed Ifield and West Green and Southgate. We have taken him even further in the car on occasion. Although yesterday his new hat, too big for him yet, covered his eyes, mainly when he goes out he sees skies and branches - black lines splitting the greys and blues and clouds that canopy his buggy. And then he sleeps.
Having lived only through a winter, he has yet to see leaves. How surprised he will be when he beholds how these twigs and branches sprout and put forth buds and produce blossoms.