Awards

Everyone who visits Mysore Bed and Breakfast deserves an award, partly because they’ve tolerated me and also missed MAnjula.

Some people go above and beyond such as …

Ina visited every year and became our biggest and closest friend. Here she’s sharing memories about MAnjula.

Her award is for constantly reminding me of the wonderfulness of MAnjula, visiting us each year and being a solid support after ‘losing’ MAnjula.

Please meet Ina

Tom and Amy, also became wonderful supportive friends being part of our life, through many visits and helping me in so many ways including at short notice, visiting to support me after MAnjula died.

To MAnjula for filling up my life.

She adapted the ‘glass half full’ saying to full full.

Florian a good friend who recently returned to Mysore from Germany for some bizarre reason has read the blog site. He’s commended for fighting his way through that jungle.

Scary

Kaveri for being my adopted granddaughter who miraculously popped into my life and with her fab character reminds me so much of MAnjula. She could have been our daughter. Here’s a video taken shortly after we met.

… and a thank you to the many people who’ve found us via the net and just said hello in the street, at a hotel, or visited us, particularly those who attend our reflective space event or come to stay in our home.

We couldn’t, of course, forget Lucie and Billet-Doux.

or Sowbaghya (aka SB) who

manages everything

Seen here with Ina

The very first reward was given fourteen years ago and still hangs in Manjula’s Library.

The T shirt was a later addition after I knew we’d fallen in love

A wonderful woman

In so many ways.

She could beat the Brit with her fast thinking humour.

This month I don’t rely just on my memory as I’m being constantly reminded by the smart phone photos of what happened five years ago when MAnjula had had enough.

This image (thanks for creating it Punith) popped up. As with everything, a story goes with it. …

Occasionally we’d have guests who’d arrive a bit fed-up. Maybe tired from the daily onslaught of travel or messed up by the consistent inconsistencies of this unpredictable land.

Manjula and I would realise (using secret signals) that we had someone who was ‘glass half full’ and then we’d turn up the jokey banter ‘smelling salts’ to help bring them round.

In due course when we were over full (when I’d lose my bedroom due to too many guests) it became known as ‘full full’. In time MAnjula used the term to reflect our happy life together.

It was ‘full full’ just too short.

’Nothing’s gonna change my world”…

I’m sitting at my work station listening and reflecting, when a Beatles track, sung by Rufus Wainwright fills the house ….. ’Nothing’s gonna change my world”…

Well guess who it reminded me of? someone who did — dramatically, initially slowly and gently and later, in an instant — change my world

The words fit perfectly.

I’m, here in Mysore, writing draft two (there will be many many more) in the midst of chapter nine (of ‘full full’, which is the working title of ‘our story’). I’m thinking of our nine years together and how Manjula and her love and shining personality transformed my life.

The song continues…….

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup

They slither while they pass they slip away across the universe

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind

Possessing and caressing me

Jai guru deva, Om

Nothing’s gonna change my world

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes

They call me on and on across the universe

Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box

They tumble blindly

As they make their way across the universe

Jai guru deva, Om

Nothing’s gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter, shades of love are ringing through my opened ears

Inciting and inviting me

Limitless undying love, which shines around me

Like a million suns and calls me on and on across the universe

Jai guru deva, Om

Nothing’s gonna change my world

Jai guru deva

..Manjula my muse, the moose, my guru 🙂

Except my written words aren’t quite flowing as described in the song.

Next up on the playlist, ‘you have a friend,’ I ask you.

Farrel Factoid, lifted from the T’Internet

Jai guru deva, Om was in the beatles song “Across the Universe“.

A simple translation is:

“I give thanks to Guru Dev (heavenly teacher) om” 

Om is just a sound. However a more detailed translation is: 

“Jai” means “O Hail” or “Victory to” 

“Guru” means “Teacher” 

Deva” means “God/Lord/Demi-God” 

“om” some say is the source of all existence that comes from vibration 

Note Guru Dev was a Maharishi’s teacher

I like

“A pair of silver anklets poured out. He lifted them against the cheek of the evening sky and he shook them to unspool their rhythmic zhan-zhan-zhan. ‘Take them with you,’ was all she said. Years later he realised what she had really given him. The sound of her feet. The preface to her movements.

As I’m now officially a writer. Ha ha. Well I have pen and a blank sheet of paper.

I spend time reading with two perspectives: firstly as the reader, I always was, appreciating the journey I’m being taken on and secondly realising more about how the writer has created and revealed their story.

I quote another book to help reveal why I like the one above.

“This feeling resonated in me. It was the resonance that had lingered on, exactly as it does when the last page is turned of a book which reaches the heart.”

I want Manjula and my story to reach the heart as it did for me.