Online launch for EXHUMATION
Tonight my book is being launched online I am very excited about it and when it is over I propose to resume my blog. See you again soon …
July 1st 1909 / 2021
On the 1st of July 1909, five shots rang out at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington and two men lay dead. Above is an artist’s view of the event from the Illustrated London News. ‘It was ascertained that the assailant is Madha Lao Dhingra, a Hindu from the Punjab who has been studying engineering…
Masi’s dressing table. ‘Ooo! Gay!’
As I live in the present I live in the magic of synchronicity I didn’t really understand what that meant until I experienced it.: A transmutation Sitting in my ‘morning chair’ with my notebook, I settle myself, looking at my pond, the wisteria beginning to bloom, the iris’s green blade leaves rising from the water,…
1950. Le Val D’Or – Tout Perdu
In the early 1980s at a point of disjuncture in my life, I attended some workshops entitled ‘Healing as Self-healing’. In one of them, a guided meditation led us through a woodland into a clearing, a healing meadow and then to a house. And the house that appeared was ‘Val D’Or’, where I’d lived when I…
1948/9 Scleroderma and Muesli
“Scleroderma is an uncommon condition that results in hard, thickened areas of skin and sometimes problems with internal organs and blood vessels.”( Wikipedia) My father’s letters to Gita Sarabhai are an aide memoir to my chronology and more. In a letter dated: 3rd August 1948, six months after my arrival in Paris, his suggests they collaborate on a book on…
Paris and Dr Radhakrishnan, 1948
Dr Radhakrishan was a very eminent man, Philosopher, Oxford professor, Knight Bachelor, Educator, Author. When, in 1962, he was appointed the second President of India, Bertrand Russell said ” Plato aspired for philosophers to become kings and it is a tribute to India that she should make a philosopher her President”. He was in Paris…
1959. SPIDER. Royal County Theatre, Bedford
‘TS Eliot was an American lived in England and became British. WH Auden was English lived in America and became American Who lost and who gained?’ I am looking aimlessly at the yellowing wisteria shedding its leaves in my garden pond when Spider’s words from 60 earlier suddenly appear – from where? I am puzzled ,…
1947 Letter from Musoorie
My first ‘object’ is a letter. First letter, first school, first separation. I remember writing it. I am four years old. In an English boarding school in Musoorie, up in the Himalayas, sitting in a room with my 9 year old sister. There is a grownup there watching over us and we are writing a…
The Wedding Photograph, Lahore 1937
‘By the time we got round to getting our wedding picture taken, I was already expecting and had become quite big. That’s why we didn’t get a full length picture.’ In our flat in Paris this wedding picture used to live on a display shelf of a tall slim ornately carved piece of furniture belonging…
Meera, Lahore, 1944
I will start with a photograph. The first photograph. Sitting in my mothers lap pointing in the direction of my father saying: “ Ooo – Gay!” ‘There – Gone!” My father, Baldoon Dhingra, was a poet, and named me Meera, after a poet he loved and admired. And I remember calling myself Meera. A few…
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Leena Dhingra 