It will be totally unfair if Joan does not dedicate a post to two of her very dear neighbours in Sarnia. For matters of privacy and convenience Joan chooses to refer to them as KB and Mrs. Perth. Joan met them for the first time in Brit tragic hero’s wine party and had felt welcome instantly because of Mrs. Perth’s warmth. The fact that she turned out to be roly-poly added to her charm. There is something about people with such a physical frame. They smile a lot and it puts you at ease, making you willing to confide in them and confess. KB was a different story altogether. A man curious to know about India and its law regarding smoking in public, he had this old world charm of a cranky old academic. Turned out that he is no academic, though he is engaged at the university’s English Institute as one. This meeting led to another at the Café Verte in Piotrkowska Street which itself deserves an entire post. And ever since then, every Thursday, Joan has met up with KB and Mrs. Perth, sometimes accompanied by Darby, at the neighbourhood café, Van Helder, raising storms over piping hot cups of English breakfast tea and apple cakes.
Mrs. Perth, an Australian, has been employed in the American Studies Department since September last year and will be here till the end of this semester before she flies home to her husband. She is the mother-hen out here, brave, spirited, resourceful, energetic, generous and let Joan not forget the fact that she bakes the best Welsh tea cakes ever. Her spreads can usually feed an army and she is to blame for the recent appearance of a triple chin on Joan’s face. She is an amazing map reader, having travelled the world intrepidly on her own in her younger days. When asked why she chose to come to this country, leaving her husband behind, among the many reasons she came up with was the fact that after 30 years of moving from place to place with her husband because of his job, it was time to strike out on her own…payback time. Don’t make a mistake; she is far from a vindictive, man-hating feminist. But she is a feminist no doubt, constantly urging Joan to not let a gap overtake her career. The two of them teaming up against the men in the building is some fun that Joan will dearly miss once Mrs. Perth leaves. Some serious girl-bonding goes on between them, with one advising the other on where to buy shoes from, staring at the same craft-work and jewellery and ruing a lack of money, the two of them discussing the unpredictable nature of the ovens in their respective apartments, dissecting Naomi Wolf’s ‘The Beauty Myth’, telling each other migration stories, stories about mining wives in Australia, mothers and mothers-in-law in India, quilting and raw silk. I’ll miss you Mrs. Perth. You are a darling!
Joan’s true darling, however, is the cranky old Irishman with whom she bonds (as she would like him to believe) like an Audrey Hepburn to a Gregory Peck. In fact, Joan refers to him as Gregory and Mr. Irish Peck’s cheeks are to be seen…all flushed as he goes… ‘O, no, no, no…’ No amount of denying can save you, KB. You just love being referred to as Gregory. But there is more to the man that Joan is smitten by than his salt-and-pepper looks or his old world eccentricities. Originally, a cultured publisher of fiction from Galway, he is a small-time novelist, a published author, who loves it (but adorably won’t admit it) when Joan asks him to lend her his books. Readers, you missed the catch, did you? He is from Galway. For an English Literature fanatic, a man from Synge’s Galway is like Gregory Peck, dearies, even if he looks like Gulshan Kumar. And here, Joan happens to know someone from Galway, with Gregory’s good looks, who recites ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ like a dream, rolling his ‘r’-s like only an Irishman can. Joan has something in common with him…their love of Yeats’ early love poetry…and she could give up hours of internet surfing and all the good looking Poles in the world to hear KB recite Yeats. And so, the conversations continue, peppered with references to ‘The Dead’ in ‘Dubliners’, to Lady Gregory, to the love of books and the romance of turning over pages of a favourite book, to childhood in the 1940s’ Ireland, to man-woman relationships, to Indian men in loin-cloths and Mother Meera in Germany. His verbal fiascos with Brit tragic hero leave us in splits and we don’t want, just don’t want the homesick Gregory to leave for his dear Ireland in a hurry.
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