can you help?
Please send a short (30 second?) audio message (video if you prefer) to make us smile, a recollection, a memory of Manjula, a joke or something else reflecting your enjoyable 🙂 time at Mysore Bed and Breakfast.
Our good friend Faizan is putting together a memory of Manjula and insights into Mysore BnB and this would be a great help.
It’s easy to do on your smart phone!
Thank you so much.
Stephen and Faizan
Please upload here
Or mail it to tadrebelproductions@gmail.com
Thank you …. thank you …. thank you.
Friends, yes guests who have always become friends and all our other worldwide friends have been wonderful supporting me through email, messages, likes, you name it.
I’ve been in London less than a week, managed a days work, granddaughter sitting and met up for wonderful support from four different sets of guests. Amazing!
OK we’re English so invariably beer is involved.
Emotional titbit
I’ve avoided going to our local hotel for a parcel (take out).
During Manjula’s last few months when unable to cook, her friend Sudha would bring a home cooked meal for her each day. I’d get a parcel from Dose Corner. So it’s a firm memory.
Well it’s been seven weeks now so I forced myself go fetch a meal and help move on.
Its a great meal and costs just 110 rs
It’s maybe not surprising but even something as simple as getting the meal is very emotional with tears welling up.
I’m slowly shifting towards happier memories. Last night I put together first stages of the photo book. I’ve been avoiding it.
It was really therapeutic. Not straightforward but really nice to do.
Moving on… with Manjula with me.
one of the directors is absent without leave.
Mycycle tours and travels Pvt ltd was set up to ensure a secure income, home etc for Manjula but now it’s not needed in quite that way.
As we’ve decided to continue two good friends, Manjula’s adopted sister Tanuja and brother Satish have stepped into the breach to become new directors.
We’re at the accountants having provided: national identity card, PAN (tax) card, bank account details, 3 x ID photos and then been videoed online to prove who they are! It’s not straightforward to put it mildly.
so here we are, the new team, continuing in Manjula and MyCycles good name.
I’ve had a bit of a wobble over the past few days. (Nothing surprising there, at the best of times).
With the invaluable and repeated help of Tom and Ann and of course my support hammock of friends (including Amy, Sue, Dave and you) around the world. I’ve reached a certain stage.
Clap of Thunder just came to Mysore nicely timed to emphasise.
I know it’s not absolute and there maybe some wavering or even three steps back in the board game of life.
Fact is I’ve been haunted by that final instruction to the Doctors to ‘let her go’ and not resuscitate Manjula after her second heart attack.
There is no way of knowing, there is no ‘best’ or ‘if only’. I did what I could do in the circumstances, in line with Manjula’s wishes to stop any further suffering, there was no choice really. She was very poorly, lost a lot of weight and was unable to fight anymore.
Intellectually that’s it, no argument, sort of accepted. Emotionally I continue to bounce around on the roller coaster.
Thank you for your support in this impossible situation.
Manjula had a most beautiful smile that many have said lit up the room and left a presence in their heart.
A smile brings us together and Manjula most definitely brought people together, crossed social, class, cultural caste and international boundaries and made connections. Just one of her astonishing attributes. (There’s that Farrell bias again 🙂)
“Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed. We communicate in a smile beyond languages, classes, and parties. We are faithful members of the same church, you with your customs, I with mine.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I know this of Manjula, she beamed her smile, passed on her warmth, lit up our way regardless of the toll her gattling gun of illnesses was making on her poor depleted body. To her very last she squeezed out a giggle and a smile.
Thank you to Janie for this wonderful portrait.
I want to help Manjula get off and get back on at an earlier time, let’s relive…. let’s try again…. if only
The special flexi specs (First introduced here) aren’t good enough. I need a Tardis. (Dr Who’s time travelling gizmo)
or….. I want to jump to an alternative reality rather than just time travel so that I can rerun our life but with a different outcome!. Let’s try again. I help Manjula get off one merry go round and then jump on another. In my magical thinking in this alternate world…. We meet, fall in love, this time she doesn’t get the series of crushing illnesses and we live happily ever after.
Maybe in this current world where she’s died she only had a very limited cache of ‘good’ luck; she used all the good luck that was left over in her life in the nine years we were together and thats why she had to go. In this alternative world she’d have more good luck.
You will see more of the total picture when I share her story. She did have a very very very tough time throughout her life and what seems like astonishingly bad luck in the 36 years before we met.
Yet she remained positive, a bright light with a beautiful smile she radiated joy.
Since we met she’s had better luck and we’ve had a wonderful life but Manjula still had to deal with her illness and its impact.
Maybe this bad luck in Manjula’s life would be interpreted by some Hindu’s as repayment for ‘mistakes’ or even repayment for ‘bad’ in a previous life. Whatever, there can be no doubt that she has now well and truly repaid her debt for any transgressions in that life.
Surely she now has a massive deposit of wealth in the Karma bank because of the good soul she has been in this life. So I hope and believe she will be kindly rewarded in her next life.
and not just with ice cream
So where is that other magic roundabout to jump onto and experience the different alternate reality? I realise I’m rambling now but miss her terribly and want her here with me now.
We have sent her off with our love and kept some of her in our own hearts.
Today is a difficult day
