Maya's Melodies

The sun is shining again at full strength and I constantly marvel at the Indian women who breeze gracefully past in their sari’s, cool as cucumbers, when I am reduced to a fried, frizzy, fraught, frazzled mess with sweat pouring down crevices I didn’t even know existed. But there we have it.

We had a breakthrough at nursery this morning. It started much the same way as other mornings, with Maya looking forward to it but bursting into tears upon arrival and begging me to stay. There is a little girl called Anya who Maya seems to quite like. She is Indian but was born in America and her family have just moved back from San Francisco and she’s a sweet little girl, also prone to crying when her Mother leaves. Anyway, I said to Maya that I would stay with her until Anya arrived, not thinking for a second this would make any difference. ‘Okay,’ chirps Maya. And sure enough, Anya arrived and Maya released her grip of me and headed inside with her friend with barely a look back at me. I was, in a word, speechless! But what a joy not to have to leave her so unhappy.

And this brings me to my next point – that both Andy and I have noticed in the past week that something very small but perceptible has shifted in Maya. She is definitely happier and more settled. In fact, she has started singing again. To backtrack a little – Maya used to sing and sing and sing. Back in Godmanchester, it was very common for her to sing away to herself for well over an hour after going to bed. And during the day, she walked round singing all kinds of things: nursery rhymes, songs she makes up and others that we play on the cd player or laptop. She is a veritable little juke box and it’s wonderful to listen to. Since arriving in Bangalore she has been singing far less but – and this is very unobservant of her parents – we didn’t quite realise how little she’d been singing until her juke box started up again. In the past week our house has been full of music and this is another indication of her feeling more contented.

Not only have we been listening to Maya’s new repertoire of nursery songs but we have double musical happiness as Andy has bought a guitar! We left dear old Pepe the guitar back in Godmanchester, being looked after by a friend (how’s he getting on Fiona?), but decided that having a strum in the evening was a must for these long, warm evenings. So now, for those passing by our apartment, the sound of a lovely little voice be heard, singing about monkeys jumping on beds and all kinds of other weird and wonderful things, interspersed with the strains of Pink Floyd, Simon and Garfunkel and Bob Marley.

Ps – If you feel like reading one of my very short stories (seriously, it’s short – it’ll take about two minutes to read), it’s just been published on The Pygmy Giant website. Go to http://www.thepygmygiant.wordpress.com/If it’s not on the homepage click on previous stories