Opening

I am sixty-six now, a handsome number for its palindromic power, the visual possibilities of scrolling itself sideways and standing on its head as ninety-nine, not to mention the endless arithmetical games one could play to drive insomnia away.
As repetition is and integral part of pattern, so, the repeated migrations of an urban nomadic life are being shaped into a recognizable pattern. The design, however, is not so easily sorted since each move happened largely beyond the realm of calculation, control and logical prediction. It has been a double ikat* life of reason and emotion, patterns of the heart and mind coinciding, changing. And each significant change resulted in migration, or trek, a concept embedded in the consciousness of every Afrikaner child. From an early age I was taught a parallel admiration for the pioneers who moved in protest from the Cape Colony and British rule and the people of Israel wandering in the desert looking for the promised land. Migration was an accepted model for dealing with dissatisfaction.
What follows is a skeleton, a cryptic outline of that life and its physical and emotional moves, a broad strokes plan for a traditional autobiography bound by chronology and first person. The rest of the book does not follow that formula because I have been lucky enough to live a multi-faceted international life with first hand knowledge of the developed, developing and under-developed neighbourhoods of the global village. Instead I have constructed a thematic memoir, which is as much about me as it is about the real and imagined landscape of our times. Travel and textile stories dovetail with tales of politics and religion. There are rites of passage stories and accounts from the world of women from Brazil to Indonesia. There are also teaching stories to make you smile and essays on personal freedom to make you think.
Except for the forced evacuations from Pakistan, the selling up and packing were motivated by dissatisfaction, either political or emotional or both, and the hope that the next place will accommodate one’s expectations and desires. Curiosity and the mantra ‘adapt or die’ became not only the mainstay of my survival but the tools to fashion an altered self, content to be me rather than what I ought to be.
So, briefly, here are the sketchy details of the seven main physical shifts made in these sixty-six years, sometimes feeling the decision to move to be exactly right, sometimes suspecting it may be upside down or back to front. Always ready to scroll through another strange land.

Migration I – One Thousand Miles away from Home - 1961

We took the trunk down to the station where the peacocks still pranced. Soon I would not hear their high-pitched cries, confusing them with the screams of the prisoners in the police station just up the road. The trunk was brand new as were most of its contents: day dresses and fancy frocks, heels and sandals, nylons and step-ins and lacy slips. The days of uniforms were over! The days of holding my tongue were almost over! That trunk with its padlocks, for which I alone held the keys, would precede me to Stellenbosch where my journey into adult life would begin.
I had a much better notion of who I would not be rather than what my choice to study languages – English, French, Latin, Afrikaans and German – would make of me. I would not be Dominee Benadé’s daughter, head girl, piano and organ playing goody two-shoes, big fish in a small bowl, fated to set a good example, forced to conform and agree with the dogma of church and state fiercely held by my parents and the majority of whites in Rustenburg, Transvaal* where I grew up. Being this person during the day became increasingly more difficult as my head swirled with unanswered questions and my heart struggled with moral issues of justice and Christ’s message of love in a world seemingly filled with unfairness and intolerance towards the Blacks around me.
Stellenbosch with its mountains, oak-lined streets and long history was exactly as I had hoped. Homesickness was never a problem; I sailed right into student life, hopping from class to class and relishing the variety and relative freedoms of the social life.
Most of my classes were taught in the Ou Hoofgebou, built late in the 19th century as the main administration building of the university. It gave me great pleasure to join my intellectual efforts with a tradition of learning in that venerable neo-classical structure with its Corinthian columns and well-proportioned gable. English was the most challenging subject: there was a high volume of required reading and, coming at it as a second language learner, it had to be done with a dictionary always at hand. It was a slow process but not impossible. What proved more elusive were the critical thinking skills required to analyze text according to the Practical Criticism method of I A Richards, strictly followed by the Department of English. Until then my education had consisted of a pabulum of ready-made answers and memorized response set in a context of conservatism. ‘Don’t think too much; it will drive you crazy’ was a common admonition. ‘Belief is what you need for a happy life, not questions,’ advised my mother in order to rein me in. This made me faith-fit but thought-feeble – not a condition in which to tackle Prac Crit, though I did recognize it as a creed for which a certain amount of faith was essential. As I struggled to apply logic and reason in an exercise to sort the written word into the worthwhile and enduring versus the trashy and ‘sentimental’. Practical Criticism became my new path as I widened its application to everything and everybody, including myself. It became the key to my escape from my former self. I majored in English, becoming better at it every year.
Latin I loved because of the mental gymnastics required making head or tail of it. I also studied Latin because of intellectual snobbery passed down through some generations of Latin loving women on my mother’s side.
French, my other major, I saw as my passport out of South Africa, perhaps as a diplomat or a foreign student. I also loved the sound of the language ever since I first heard Édith Piaf sing la Vie en Rose.
The component of my studies particularly irksome to my father was extra courses in Political Philosophy taught by a soft-spoken suspected subversive who knew the fine art of weaving an attractive web of part answers to part questions. In his class, we sat in our left-bank black, some with their feet on the tables! God forbid an administrator should ever walk in! We narrowed our eyes and turned down our mouths as we basked in the glory of Kierkegaard and Kant, as selective quotations from Nietzsche confirmed that God was dead. Absurdity, Satre and Camus! In that class, for those moments we were all existentialists.
While I was building my rudimentary intellectual furniture, I was also developing my social self. At home potential boyfriends were intimidated by my father’s position; only the bold risked having ’bibles thrown at them’. In my case it was also a matter of liking boys who liked other girls and finding the ones who liked me boring. It was not that I was sexually incurious but I did value conversation and was tethered to a strict moral code enforced by warnings like ‘babies begin with kissing’ and ‘men have no respect for girls who cheapen themselves’. There were examples of ‘fallen’ girls disowned by their families ending up scrubbing floors in the home for unmarried women, a charity unenthusiastically supported by my mother’s church ladies.
Friendships with girls were always easy and in Stellenbosch it was no different. What was different was the attention from young men. There was a calling card system in place at reception in residence; for many years I kept my collection of calling cards as a reminder of that jolly time, connecting the penmanship with the person.  There was the fluid italic hand of the American boyfriend so disapproved of by my father.  He returned to America but that was not the end. There was the businesslike scrawl of the medical student whose offer of the pill I refused. He became a Rhodes scholar and missed his chance with me. There was the careful longhand of the editor who published my terse poems and made me feel really clever but he won a scholarship and shipped off to Germany.
I left university with a BA degree but without a ring on my finger, which must have been a disappointment to my parents. I took the trunk home and stored it in my father’s garage until the next move.

Migration II – to the Zim of yesteryear - 1965

Love and marriage prompted my next move since one without the other meant constant parental interrogation as to my (especially nocturnal) whereabouts. In order to get off the shelf while pleasing my parents, I found a fellow whose pedigree and prospects looked perfect on paper: he had a venerable Afrikaans name, his father was a Broederbonder* like mine, his brother was a Dutch Reformed minister like mine, his sister was married to a prominent Afrikaner historian, the PhD he was working on would assure me of the honorific Mevrou Doktor, he looked healthy and virile. We would be married, produce grandchildren and live happily ever after. As a token of his approval my father sent my prospective husband home with a basket full of naartjies – tangerines – and a sack full of kudu biltong – dried meat delicacy. This was a gift of tribal significance, reserved only for the chosen few.
All appeared perfect but it was a deception, a chain of omissions stretched far into the sixteen years of our life together, blinding ourselves and the world.
At the beginning, however, we convinced ourselves that we were perfectly suited with our intellectual pretensions and a common desire to escape the stifling imperatives of Afrikaner church and state. Our shared rebelliousness and a mutual curiosity about other cultures and places held us together.
Shortly after the beginning of our courtship, he found a job as a clinical psychologist in Rhodesia**. I was working for the Department of Information in Pretoria. Determined to appear rational and ‘unsentimental’ I took a holiday to check out the career possibilities for myself in Rhodesia; I was not just getting married to be a housewife, no, I needed to be a working wife, a financial partner. My French major had not yielded a scholarship or a diplomatic career and the dead-end job in Pretoria came about through Broederbond strings pulled by my father. So, BA certificate and testimonials in hand I approached the Rhodesian Department of Education who, short of teachers was apparently not insistent on teacher certification. For a frustrated actress, teaching was not nearly glamorous enough and, yet, to this day, it is in front of classrooms that I have done my best improvisatory acting. I discovered I loved teaching for the tension in the give and take of knowledge, the opportunities for humour and guidance, and, I have to admit, the flattery that comes with admiration and recognition. Will I ever forget the two suitcases needed to cart away the wedding presents given to me by my pupils from Hatfield Girls High?
Three months before my wedding I was seconded to Umtali* Girls’ High for a term. It coincided with my fiancé’s exchange trip to the US during which I had the use of his, soon to be our, blue VW beetle. I had never felt as free. It was during this time that I bonded with the landscape of that beautiful country. I drove that little beetle all over the Eastern Highlands and across the border to Mozambique. It became the first foreign country in my collection.
Shortly before my marriage in 1965, Ian Smith declared Rhodesian unilateral independence from England and the anti-black atmosphere we thought we had escaped descended like a choking social fog on the White community in which we worked. My husband scoured the job section of the British Psychological Society and was offered a job at a Child Psychiatry Unit in Newcastle upon Tyne.
As we listened to the funeral of the assassinated South African prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, we applied waterproofing to the little mountain tent that would shelter us on our European camping adventures. I filled my trunk with records, books and my trousseau of linen and lace. It would join my husband’s belongings and travel by steamer to Southampton and from there by truck to the Northeast.
We clutched our hopes and ambitions with our inadequate passports as we boarded the charter to Luxembourg and happily waved goodbye to Africa.

Migration III – Civilized in Britain - 1967

Periodically I entertain the whimsical notion that if I were a piece of china the manufacturer’s mark on the sole of my right foot would read: ‘Born in South Africa’ and on that of my left foot: ‘Civilized in Britain’. The little over four years living in England and traveling on the Continent marks the beginning of my transformation from a tribal Afrikaner to a world citizen. Suddenly I was free from the pressure to conform to the Christian Nationalist ideology, free from the stress of resisting the expectations of my family and those who knew someone who knew my family, free from the immediate guilt for rejecting the values of my people. At last I could relax and turn my attention to a culture which, since childhood had had a negative connotation. Finally I could resolve the ambivalence between the Victorian values of prudery and etiquette instilled in me by my mother and the contempt for all things English held by my father. Now, in 1966, I was my own person in swinging England, full of curiosity, ready to embrace every experience that would dispel the old stereotypes and rid me of the toxic hatred infused in the collective memory of Afrikaners since the Boer War.

The truck arrived at the hospital where we were being given a room to store our belongings until we found a flat. I was called to mange the delivery. A large crate with Cape Town stencils stood on top of the Lloyds shipping truck. The deliveryman looked at me expectantly.
“If you take it down, I’ll show you the room where it goes,” I said vaguely indicating the inside of the dark Victorian building in front of us.
After a few moments of processing my thick South African accent he gestured in a helpless manner:
“Me? Tak it doon? I divvent knaa hoo! The creign put it there!”
My puzzlement was complete. What language was he speaking? As they say in Northumberland: ‘if ye divvent knaa what divvent knaa means ye’ll nivvor knaa hoo to oonderstand Geordie’.
A kind bystander stepped in as interpreter and persuaded the deliveryman to unpack the crate right there on top of the truck while a team of hospital orderlies trundled our possessions to their temporary resting place. The trunk came out unscathed with its little padlocks intact and sporting its first international label.
I learnt how to understand Geordie, the local accent quite well. Carol, my classroom assistant at the School for the Deaf where I worked, was a native speaker and my personal coach. Her nickname for me was ‘Mrs. Cannybody’. It was explained to me that ’canny’ in Geordie meant ‘cute’ rather than ‘crafty’ in its Scottish usage. Some aspects of the dialect drew directly from Norse and Saxon sources, thus: bairn for ‘child’ is barn in Norwegian as is gannin hyem for ‘going home’. A Geordie naturally uses ay for ‘yes’ and sup for ‘drink’. Carol regularly made me say bu’er and moosta’d; the first sounded very similar to the French for butter as for the second: one needed a mouthful of Colman’s to say that properly. Eventually I was able to do a convincing rendering of bits of the dialect to amuse non-natives.
After a year in a flat in Jesmond, we bought a house in Cramlington New Town, a brand new housing estate built to accommodate workers of the light industries that sprang up in the wake of pit closures. Many of our neighbours had grown up on Council estates and had never owned property before. They were extremely house-proud and on weekends the place was a hive of activity as lawns were mowed, windows cleaned and flowerbeds tended. Most had benefited from a postwar educational system, which offered many more opportunities to working class children. Many valued education as a way to escape the lingering British class system
‘Where do you belong?’ they asked instead of ‘Where do you come from?’ But while their eyes narrowed in amazement at the thought of my ‘home’ so many thousands of miles away they brought their buckets and brushes and scrubbed my kitchen floor to welcome me to the neighbourhood. Later, when I took my baby for his first airing around the estate, all kinds of people I did not even know came out to greet the baby. Amid exclamations of in’ he a canny lad and what a bonnie bairn I heard mutterings of ‘money being dirty’ as hands fumbled under the pram mattress. When I got home I lifted the mattress and found a small fortune in half-crown pieces. My neighbour explained that it is the custom to cross the palm of a newborn baby with silver. This brings good luck to the donor and the recipient. To me it brought a certain sense of belonging to be thus included in an ancient tribal tradition.
Every weekend saw us exploring County Durham and Northumberland with its rolling hills and long history. What a relief it was to objectively learn of events in the past rather than be subjectively drawn into one’s nationalist duty. Guidebook in hand we traversed the Roman ruins along the Tyne and Hadrian’s Wall. We stooped as we entered ancient Saxon churches and walked tall from the one end to the other of Durham Cathedral to take in the shrine of Saint Cuthbert, the head of Saint Oswald and the tomb of the Venerable Bede. In Hexham Abbey I heard live medieval music for the first time. I began to recognize the decorative elements from different periods and realized I preferred social to political history.
School holidays and long weekends turned us into proper tourists: we used the short breaks for trips to Scotland or the Lake District or to visit friends in the south of England. But come July we would pack the camping gear in the station wagon and head for Dover, then Calais and then Europe. Once we drove all the way to Greece. To this day the map of Europe evokes memories of mountains and rivers, palaces and cathedrals, museums and ruins, food and faces. Like a pack of cards I shuffle these memories and play patience in my old age.

My husband decided to return to South Africa to be close to his aging parents. Nature mimicked my sadness as left Newcastle in a mournful drizzle.
Again the trunk went on ahead. This time it was full of the baby’s books and many educational toys.

Migration IV – Cape Sojourn - 1972

The same country, a different person. I did not realize how much I had changed until, shortly after our arrival in Cape Town, I found myself in a railway car full of bemused passengers. I ignored the curious glances as I took my very blond blue-eyed baby on my lap to look out of the window. Why were they all staring? Something was wrong, but what? And then it dawned on me: I had stepped into the first car at hand without checking to see if it was ‘Whites Only’ and found myself in the ‘Coloureds* Only’ part of the train! (And there were even a few ‘Black’ cars with wooden benches to the rear) I was thrilled about my progress in ridding myself of my former racist conditioning but knew I could be in trouble with the conductor. But he was in a mellow mood and told me to watch out next time I get on the train. I had always pitied people of colour for the restrictions forced upon them by the laws of the Apartheid régime; now I realized that I was not free either. How I longed to be back in England; even if I ‘did not belong, I would not have to watch where I walked, weigh with whom I talked and, most importantly guard against touching anyone browner than me.
With its stunning vistas of mountain and sea, Cape Town is one of the most beautiful places to live. We crisscrossed the peninsula and explored the wine country finding kid-friendly places to eat and walk. It was thrilling to get to know the landscape in different seasons: the flowers in spring, the beach heat of summer, the moody winter weather and autumn’s rusts and ochers. We returned many times to Groot Constantia, one of the oldest wine farms, not only to walk and buy wine but also to look at the deed of sale signed by Olof Bergh when he bought the farm. It was proof in black and white of the existence and prominence of the ancestor so revered on my maternal side. A seed was planted in my consciousness; it took decades to germinate and more to come to fruition but, eventually, it resulted in the writing and publication of Kites of Good Fortune.
The natural beauty of the Cape only managed in part to lighten the deep depression we felt about the social malaise we experienced on a daily basis. In the early 70s, Apartheid had a firm grip on all of South African society. My husband was working for the University of Cape Town and we found ourselves on the liberal side of the White community. Emboldened by the many anti-Apartheid arguments we had come to share in Britain, we now added our voices to the liberal chorus of English speaking South Africa. Our families in the North knew we had come back ‘pink’ and worried that we would be an embarrassment. On our arrival my husband was questioned about ‘subversive literature’ (Mandela’s speech from the dock) he had sent to a friend from England. In an interview for promotion in the Army, my youngest sister was told that ‘they knew about us but not to worry; every family has its black sheep’. We knew our telephone was being tapped not only from the regular clicks and beeps, but also from actual interjections into our conversations. Threatening phone calls followed a letter I wrote to the newspaper criticizing police brutality in crowd control. For a week I kept the front windows shuttered.
For all its liberal talk, to me, the campus crowd was a disappointment. At dinner parties women with opinions were often given the brush-off while men claimed the monopoly on ideas. Time and again I sat with supposedly open-minded academic wives discussing the defects of servants and comparing methods on how to secure their tea and sugar against the same. My husband’s psychology colleagues had embraced a version of Haight-Ashbury hippiedom and I was under great pressure to participate in the activities of their encounter groups. These included not only endless self-indulgent navel gazing but also determined pot smoking and experimentation with other drugs. My lack of enthusiasm for this company was seen as judgmental and evidence of a puritanical streak left from my past. A second pregnancy gave me some breathing space from the pressure to ‘swing’ with the crowd.
I was living on the rim of a vortex. Only my babies kept me from harming myself. I knew I had to leave South Africa again. And soon. Given the anxiety in myself and those around me, I did not see how I could raise my own children in the relaxed and positive atmosphere all children need to thrive.
On a sabbatical to North America my husband found a job in Canada. He was conflicted. When the offer came we talked about it through the night. The next day he told me he had two letters: one accepting, one declining. Which one should he mail? ‘It’s your hand that will put it in the mailbox,’ I said. I did not know which one he posted until we received the reply saying ‘delighted to have you’.
Now the trunk was off to the new world, across the Atlantic and up the Saint Lawrence River to Montréal where it would make its way by road to Hamilton, Ontario.

Migration V – Oh Canada! My home and adopted land- where I got all I expected and more than I bargained for. - 1976

At last I was in a neutral place, with all the other immigrants who left the social and economic troubles of their native lands behind in order to make a better life for themselves and their children. Yes, I still came across racism and chauvinism but it was not the norm and was most definitely discouraged by the laws of the land. Prosperity and equal opportunity softened the edges of prejudice and meritocracy across gender backed ambition. It was fine to repudiate a racist joke and turn away from anti-feminism. Schools reinforced values of kindness and co-operation while encouraging creativity and critical thinking. Universal healthcare served as preventative mental healthcare as no one worried the cost of getting sick.
I thought I had landed in Utopia and set about organizing my children and managing my home. We were living in a country where social justice was no longer a source of anxiety, my husband liked his work and it looked as though ‘happily ever after’ had finally arrived. Were it not for the adjective ‘recreational’. Whereas, in the places I had lived before it was applied to all regular pastimes; in the New Utopia it was code for experimentation with drugs and sex. The calm Canadian political climate had taken the wind out of the sails of our former common rebellion against Church and State. And sadly we drifted apart as we each sought to direct our energy in a meaningful way. While I became a devotee of parent effectiveness, my husband embraced various recreational freedoms. ‘Recreational’ infidelity eroded what once was a rock solid partnership, mutual interest in each other faded until neglect finally drained my love away.
Soon after we became Canadian citizens I began thinking about separation. It would be the most reckless decision of my life. The day my husband left it felt as though I had moved without packing a single bag. Certainly, as far as status was concerned, I had moved from Cozy Corners to Shit Street. I had little value in the job market, having spent a decade as a full-time mother. The novel I had written did not sell and teaching without certification was unheard of. Still, I had skills. Piano pupils soon filled the slots after school while I worked in a neighbour’s consignment store some mornings and took music courses at the university. These together with a stint at a Children’s International Centre added to my portfolio when I applied to teachers’ college. In 1986 I finally earned a respectable salary as a French teacher. I moved from the matrimonial home to a home of my own to live my ‘new’ life – happily ever after or not – as a single Mom and career woman.
In the basement sat my trunk full of scrap fabric: Liberty prints left from my daughter’s pre-school dresses and the satin and fur from long-since discarded Halloween costumes. Here, for moments of nostalgic indulgence, could also be found photos of my student days and slides of my wedding.

Migration VI – The Return of the Yank - 1990

We had been apart for as long as Nelson Mandela had been in prison. Over the years there had been Christmas cards and the odd visits en famille but after a rendezvous in Maseru it was decided we should surrender to fate and work towards spending the rest of our lives together. Madly in love means exactly that; impulsive decisions drive irrational, often selfish, actions. We were married in 1992. I finished the school year in Canada and moved to Brazil where he was working. The third phase of my life had begun. The trunk came with me with the trousseau of a middle-aged bride.
Rio de Janeiro competes with Cape Town for scenic excellence. Our apartment overlooked Botafogo Bay and was directly opposite the Corcovado. From our penthouse balcony we watched Christ weather sun, wind and rain, now clear, now completely obscured. On rare occasions only the face peered through passing clouds. To a person of faith in might have been a miraculous protracted revelation; to me it was a mesmerizing marvel to behold. Through the bedroom window we saw the sun rise over Guanabara Bay while the Sugarloaf stood to attention. Every day was filled with the heaviness of the intoxicating beauty all around.
But it was dangerous. I was briefed on how to blend in, how to spot a street gang and how to seek shelter should I be followed. I count myself lucky that in the two years in Rio I was never threatened or mugged. I used taxis and the subway to get around and did not go ‘looking for trouble’ in places like the Botanical Gardens or areas of the city where I knew street gangs roamed. The school bus picked me up at the door with the same meticulous safety procedures designed to discourage kidnappers.
The alternative training in the Orff* method now stood me in good stead. The Escola Americana in Rio de Janeiro had no use for a French teacher but had long been looking for an Orff teacher to teach in their Montessori pre-school division. Soon I had seven classes, from ages three to six, clapping, stamping, patsching** and snapping, chanting and singing an unfamiliar childhood repertoire in a language they had all been sent to the school to learn – two thirds of the pupils were lusophone, from wealthy families.
It was soon clear that learning Portuguese would enhance my enjoyment of the place and its people as well as make my practical life easier. In lessons for ex-pat teachers offered by the school I learnt enough to get around though I could never joke or argue in Portuguese - it remained purely functional. In return for these classes I taught after school English classes to the secretarial staff, applying the methodology of my French teaching in another life.
As friends and family came to visit, we traveled to the standard tourist destinations though we never saw the Amazon. Before we could get there, the order came to move to Pakistan.

Migration VII - Life in the Land of the Pure - 1995

A greater contrast is hard to imagine: from bare-bodied, carnival-crazy Brazil we went to the subdued and sequestered Land of the Pure.*** What I knew about the history of Pakistan I gleaned from long-ago readings of Midnight’s Children and Shame and most of my knowledge of Islam came from studying The Satanic Verses, giving me a distinctly Rushdiean bias. Still, it was my enthusiasm for those books that made me open and curious about the country – tell that to the fatwa waving mullas!
The raised eyebrows and looks of pity of almost all who heard about our Islamabad posting signaled that in most Western eyes we were sentenced to some kind of exile in a cultural wilderness. My hackles rose at those very looks as I determined to defy the negative perceptions of the people and culture of the place I was now to call home.
In a society where lives are lived inside the compound rather than out on the street, it takes time to, as Greg Mortenson puts it, get to the third cup of tea. Many a potential friendship faltered because of the lack of cultural savoir-faire and confused expectations on both sides. I was just as much locked into my cultural ‘compound’ as wife of an American civil servant with a huge house, servants, commissary shopping privileges and fancy transportation. No wonder we were perceived as equivalent to the feudals controlling the lives of working Pakistanis. At first, it seemed we were attracting the disaffected, though they would think of themselves as progressive and modern. There were those who thought that having a Canadian or American friend would advance them in the visa process. There were men who assumed Western women were like those they saw on ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’. There were some who saw a dinner invitation as an opportunity to sample quantities of Johnnie Walker. I recognized some of this behaviour, having grown up in a puritanical society. It took time to sort these contacts and find the right place for them within one’s own comfort zone.
It was at work at the British School and the International School of Islamabad that I got to know professional Pakistani women who had no agenda other than the advancement of their own careers and the education of their children. There were also the parents of my Pakistani piano pupils who added to my understanding of the lives of the privileged of that society. These, as well as the students themselves, are the people who gave me the ‘third cup of tea’ that draws the country to my heart for always. In addition, over the years, there were three men I got to know really well: Latif cleaned my house and did the laundry. On the last day in Pak he went about the last packing with a sad face, singing about piyar – love in Urdu. I knew better than to call him on it but I will never forget the message. Yussuf planted my garden with flowers from my youth and herbs to turn the tough halaal meat into pungent french stews. Though sent to work in the mines at eight, along the line someone taught him to read and write English.  Sadiq was cook for a year when I taught fulltime giving the same devoted attention to the menu as he did to his Faith. It is the only close-up I ever got of a really devout Muslim man.
Another source of cultural interpretation was the Asian Studies Group whose membership consisted largely of Westerners. Here we were offered lectures and fieldtrips to enlighten us on anything from Pakistani history to cuisine. It was an excellent way to become informed about the country but also to interact with the international community, which was tight-knit because of the isolation many felt. My own involvement in the Arts and Crafts group led to a study and presentation on the tradition of mendhi – henna body painting and a lecture –tour of a warehouse filled with furniture from Swat.
Other organized trips took us as far a field as the Swat Valley, Baltistan, Gilgit and the Hunza. Every visitor who came our way was shown Taxila. The lucky ones got to go to Peshawar and take the train safari up the Khyber Pass. So mere names changed to real places and the map became an unforgettable landscape of majestic mountains and desolate plains, of gorges and deep ravines with rivers rushing and glaciers crackling. Thus travel in such wild and wonderful places is the supplementary weaving that turns the plain cloth of knowledge into a rich brocade.
One of the advantages of a long residence in another country is that one becomes accustomed to the rhythm of its customs. No more was this so than in Pakistan where the routines of religion impacted one’s life every day. Over the years we became so used to the call to prayer five times a day that I found myself deprived on evacuation in Washington or on holiday in South Africa (away from the Malay Quarter). ’Are people here not religious?’ my little inside voice would ask. Any Muslim would answer: ‘Of course not; they are all kafir- infidels.’ In Pakistan Islamic holidays shaped the year as privations of Ramadan (pronounced Ramzan in Pak) led to the celebrations of Eid.
There were secular events in the calendar too: Every Sunday vendors gathered for a craft market. Many of these were Afghans selling anything from ex-Soviet binoculars to fake Bactrian coins. It was a great source for beads of a variety of semi-precious stones, carpets and textiles. In the spring one knew to look for kites filling the sky for the festival of Basant and every year Lok Virsa attracted artisans from across the country in a giant crafts fair. This event was the opportunity to stock up on lengths of embroidered, hand loomed and block printed fabrics. These would be sewn into salwar suits by the tailor master who hand brought his own hand sewing machine and sat on the floor making memsahib’s clothes. I happily dressed in those salwar suits; their wide pants and loose fitting tops did much to disguise the girth of middle age. The third part of the costume, the dupatta or scarf, though a nuisance to keep track of came in very useful when traveling in the countryside where a covered head meant respect for local customs. I was thanked more than once for applying the dupatta at shrines or around mosques at prayer time. Ironically, I once arrived in the US wearing a salwar kameez and was the only passenger pulled out for an ‘agricultural’ check!
The proximity of India made it easy to hop on a plane and explore the other, not so serious, side of the curtain of Partition curtain. With my sister I ventured to Delhi and Rajastan, a textile trip took me to Gujarat and all the way up to the Rann of Kachchh. Then my son came to work at the Canadian School in Bangalore and made many trips in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala possible. Twice I was invited to Goa to do nothing but sit in a coconut grove by the Arabian Sea from sunrise to glorious sunset. Once we combined an archival trip for my husband to Colombo with a ride along the west coast of Sri Lanka to Galle and on through the tea plantations to the Temple of the Tooth in Kandi.
It was in the forced seclusion of Islamabad with its lack of public entertainment and modest social demands that I seriously began thinking of turning my research on my ancestors into a novel. In my husband’s library I found the essential primary source materials to construct profiles for Angela of Bengal, her daughter Anna de Koning and her son-in-law Olof Bergh. The accounts of visitors to the Cape gave an insight on the society of the time and tertiary source reading on Holland in the Golden Age fleshed out the facts. But it was on a visit to Cape Town that my imagination began to stir: I examined the inventories and auction records of Angela and Anna in the Archives, walked where they walked and stared endlessly at the mountains they must have seen every day. It came to me that if I was going to write about things I know the fictional Anna de Koning would be bits of me, a crazy quilt of my interests and outlook. On the way back to Pakistan I spent two glorious days looking at 17th century drawing of Cape flowers.
Back in Islamabad I closed my door every morning for four or five hours of sustained writing of Kites of Good Fortune. That was the fun part; then came the marketing.  Keeping a tally of rejections totally destroys one’s equanimity but I do have a mental black book where the most shabby treatment stand recorded: For a whole year the manuscript was in limbo with an editor who loved it and a publisher who not make up its mind. Indelible, still, is the insult of being rejected because of a publisher’s reader whose haughty report showed only a cursory scan and an ignorance of the facts. Slowly I lost my innocence and the belief that my book would be published because of its merit. Right, I thought; if no one will publish it, I will keep the manuscript and desktop publish it one day for family and friends to read. As we now know that was not the end of it.
The piano has always been my emotional regulator. To balance my research and writing I took on enough piano pupils to fill four weekday afternoons. The pupils came from the international as well as the local community and ranged in ages from six to thirty-six. One on one remains my favourite teaching situation where teaching style can be tailored to learning style. I also improved my own repertoire by playing and practicing new pieces. I thank those days for my present fluency.
The 1998 missile strike aimed at killing Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan was the reason for our first evacuation from Pakistan to Washington DC. In the event of and evacuation of non-essential personnel one gets on a plane with one suitcase and fifty pounds of air-freight. On State Department per diem one stays in a housekeeping apartment in the US until such time as it is deemed safe to return. We went to Washington DC where my husband’s job had its headquarters. It is the closest one can get to basic living in the Western World: one of everything and a few personal things to remind one that somewhere there is a locked house called home. Two more evacuations followed. Always the Pollyanna, I made the best of it by frequenting the museums of the Smithsonian and taking in movies. Once I registered to do substitute teaching and on both the other occasions the Library of Congress, where my husband worked, offered me contract work. Curiously, I wrote my best poems during these evacuations.
The last evacuation was ordered in 2002 after grenades were tossed into a church full of US diplomats. I was in India and saw my neighbour on a gurney on television. She was dead. I came back to Islamabad and had three days to sort what I really wanted and what I could do without. What I chose was locked in a room awaiting the next posting. I filled my trunk with textiles hoping against hope that I would ever see them again.

Migration VIII – On to the Ring of Fire - 2003

Indonesia had always been a dream place for me. In 1968 I saw my first real Indonesian batik and a shadow puppet show in the Tropical Museum in Amsterdam. Years before I had learnt the wax-resist method used to make batik and had produced my own crude lampshades and placemats. The complexity of the traditional designs was overwhelming as were the exotic sounds of the gamelan music accompanying the shadow puppet show. A longing for the land where these were a way of life stayed with me like the memory of a dream. Realistically I could not see how I would ever get to Indonesia.
Then, in 2003, my dream came true. We were to spend the two years leading to my husband’s retirement in Jakarta. Under multiple layers of security we lived on floor 12A (instead of 13, to accommodate the superstitious!) of a glass and marble tower block overlooking a patchwork of old and new Jakarta. On a clear day one could see volcanoes in a distance but those were few and far between because of the pall of pollution hanging over the city most days. During tropical storms it felt as though we lived in the pyrotechnic part of heaven where the collision of nobbly, big clouds produced thunder and lightning right outside our many large windows.
Again I was in the same situation as in Rio de Janeiro where few locals spoke English. Without ado I enrolled in an intensive course in Bahasa Indonesia. Sixty hours later I came out stuffed with phrases for traveling and shopping, the essential vocabulary for food, clothing and the calendar. Many technical terms I knew already since they were all Dutch. There were even words brought by the Portuguese for things unknown to the locals of the 16th century.  I carefully internalized the unit on culture, which warned of the three K taboo subjects to be avoided in conversation with Indonesians. These were: Kommunisme, Korrupsie and Konfrontasie. The unit on the use of the passive voice was closely linked to the third. This was not only an insight into an essential social trait but it became a useful tool in interacting with people made nervous by centuries of the Western use of the imperative.
My work, teaching music at the International School, opened the door to my ambition to play in a gamelan orchestra. On Monday afternoon I piled into a mini school bus with other enthusiasts and crossed the city to the main campus where two full compliments of gamelan instruments resided. Gingerly I entered into that sounds cape that had stayed with me like a dream for thirty-five years. Listening to gamelan music is trancelike but being part of the ensemble, surrounded by the penetrating sound of brass percussion and pulled along by the unpredictable rhythm and tempi of the drum, is like being part of trance creation. My bones sometimes still reverberate with the memory of the experience.
As in Islamabad, Jakarta had its own Indonesian Heritage Society, which attracted many ex-pat wives. I joined the textiles group and after some group trips to study batik and weaving the opportunity came to spend a week actually making batik at a studio in Yogyakarta.
With these two accomplishments my cup was running over. I thought my luck complete until the email from David Philip Publishers arrived in my inbox. Soon after we came to Jakarta I had fired off another volley of submissions to publishers in an effort to get Kites of Good Fortune published. The Internet had become a friendlier tool since my earlier attempts to sell the book from Pakistan. Three years before an editor from the same publisher had sent me a boilerplate ‘sorry, but don’t take it to heart’ reply to my query. This time the initial query was followed by a request for some chapters, and then more until the whole manuscript was sent electronically. Silence. Silence. And then the 1KB message saying only Re: Kites of Good Fortune. I left the computer came back and looked at the inbox. Left again. Came back and braced myself for another disappointment. Then I read the offer of a contract. It was like being told I was pregnant! And, as with the real thing, the pregnancy had its problems and the birth had its complications the end result was totally fulfilling. In August 2004 I went to South Africa for the launch of Kites at Groot Constantia, the farm that once belonged to my ancestors. The next year an Afrikaans translation of Kites was launched in Stellenbosch, town of my alma mater. A wheel had come full circle.
I returned to Jakarta to supervise the packing for our move to retirement in the US. I hand packed the trunk, however, carefully placing batiks and ikats, ajaraks, handlooms and embroideries on top of the remains of the original trousseau.

Migration VIII – New England - 2005

‘The winter waits for no one,’ I said to my husband, ‘we need to find a place to house your books before November. But where?’
We were in the same Foggy Bottom apartment building we had used during evacuations. My husband had another month to go at the Library. He opened a map and pointed vaguely to the area around Boston and settling on the North shore. ‘I rode my bike around here when I was at College,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll like it.’
He was right. After a year in a rental we bought our present house in Ipswich, Massachusetts. This is where home is now. It is here that I finished Bluestocking and where I am writing The Layered Life of Tok-Tokkie with the support of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. I go out regularly to substitute teach at one or other of the local schools, revisiting my natural place, the classroom while getting a measure of the community through its children. It is a safe and gentle place to be.
Like my life, my story is a work in progress. Much has already happened during this migration but telling its stories is like making good bread: let it prove a while and rise properly before the baking.
Behind me sits the trunk, a little worse for wear, as I am but still sturdy and functional.