The ways we haunt
For Dad (1929 or 1930 or sometime around then to 17th Feb 2016)
Standing on The Edge
Backing track for this read: Another Sky by Nitin Sawney
You visited me in my sleeplessness last night Dad, on a drift of ‘a mystical aroma that touches many chords in the conscious and subconscious mind, awaking it to full alertness’. Hem Precious Fragrance, one stick always lit at dawn before you hum the Japji Sahib. You carried that aroma around with you wherever you went, between the stitches of your M&S woolly cardigan, between the folds in your turban, pressed into rosewood mala beads by your fingers. Your unexpected arrival confused me as perfumed smoke slid through my nostrils, vaporised my blood and invoked you into here and now. You’ve never visited me like this before, is this really you? Are you trying to tell me something?
This year, I’m remembering you like this. Walking over the cobbled path, towards Stanage Pole, that thin needle of wood elevated in the moors above Stanage Edge, near Sheffield. The cobbles are dew-glinting and rippled by hundreds of years of step-after-step-after-step. The pole is a meeting point, a point of distance, of familiarity. A spot to pause, to look down towards Redmires Reservoir at a good haunting.
We used to haunt this place together Dad. Rattling along into far away, you changing gears and spinning the wheel, driving your Bermuda Blue Morris Minor Traveller along dirt tracks until you squeezed the brakes to a stop. I am four years old and being hitched up onto your hip as if I am air and precious and folded into woolly warmth & heartbeats. I see this vast hammered wetness – the pani, the first time my eyes had to open so wide and flicker against the wind. I must’ve swallowed it whole and it became a part of me because I begged for you to take me back. And you do take me back, every year.
After fire made you dust, you became part of the River Sutlej and flowed. Somewhere I once read that all the pani in the world is connected. That means maybe you made it back here. I wanted to be at the side of the reservoir today, find our foot-imprints again & the shape of our shadows and tie the yellow roses to the fence. If you made it back here, does this hair-sogging drizzle have tiny droplets of you in it, like some kind of homeopathic remedy?
