The Allure of the Azure

A poem by Aimee Coleman

I notice the wiggle
  of the springtime leaves 
  by 
     the jiggle 
       of light
  on my dark screen

I look first
   at the screen
 then the shadows
  upon it
Then the source – 
 up and out,
  through the window

Outside

Oh! The sky out there
  is uninterruptedly blue
  I should probably 
   go – follow
    the allure of the azure
 and the leaves
They’re making jazz hands
  at me now

A whispery but emphatic
  drumroll
A patient but persistent 
  call to me

Come, do this with your fingers
Come, stand here,
 like this,
  next to me

Photo credit: Olivier Collet

You taught me

By Aimee Coleman

Buy a book
 not a certificate

Put your fingers 
 around a pen 
 until you can’t read your
 handwriting towards the end

Converse awkwardly,
 unexpectedly,
 red-faced and sweaty

Put a penny in
 instead of everything,
 everything you have to win,
 win big
    as if
    you’re pursuing 
    due diligence

When your saliva’s in the fibres
    of the newspaper’s edge
    and yet 
         at the corner of the betting slips
       still – 
            you’ll pick the bookie’s baby biro instead
              for your grip

Be attacked 
    by the rabid ambition 
    of another 
        Show them your neck 
        Feel the ferocity 
           of someone else’s desire to be promoted 
         So now they’ve boasted 
           their career 
           and their connections
            let them put their empty briefcase on the table
           then demand your curated one
        Never mind the tat
           of dealings sticking out like candied tongues 
           humiliating 
           or requesting more

Get your point torn apart 
 disgraced for its platitudes
 Be the object of disdain
  
You’ve not learned yet
   about how powerful this shame 
   so you don’t know 
  to turn it upside down 
  outside in 
  downside up
to see what it is 
to hear how it feels
The shame 
   of your own incompetence 
      – that’s the gain!

Buy a book
 buy a few 
No certificate 
    is worth 
    the trade required
    from you 

To get where you’re going 
   you’ll need to live through it all 
   anyway

Buy a book,
   borrow one even 
 Every little counts,
   one would suppose 
    that money won’t save you 
  from the doing you’ll be doing 
  anyhow.    

Photo credit: Solstice Hannan

We spoke of many things,
	you and I
About India
 – a little of Chennai
About collective living
	and the potency 
of its dye


About work
	and its impact
on the deep tissue 
	of our bodies
And how we feel it
	pull on us fully


About parenting
– the known and unknown 
the privilege and accountability
of parenting children
	who aren’t our own


About the things we love
– books, reading, letters, writing – 
	and stories before bed
Gosh, should we both have been
	librarians instead?


About the people we love
	and the miles of smiles
		they’ve evoked
and now – on you – 
the millimetre milestones 
your cheeks uninhibitedly emote


About the work that stacks 
	the pyre inside
		and the work that inspires 
fires in our minds


About the people
	we both know well
and those we especially admire
The projects that accelerated 
our paths
and the reputations
we’ve each acquired


We spoke of many things,
 	you and I 
Across the table,
	as we sipped
About life, 
	and work
		and family 
– the stories we’ll keep
   for mirth and myth

I wrote this many years ago, for my cousins, about the strange violence and joy of growing up together — and the places where childhood leaves its mark. I just found my way back to it.

Photo credit: Claudio Schwarz

Remember When.

A poem written and revisited by Aimee Coleman

Remember when…
	your brother got impaled 
	on the fence?
A wrought iron prong 
made itself known
from below
        alongside bone
through the parchment of his thigh?


He sat still, didn’t he?
He’d fallen out of a tree.
An apple the same shape
	as our whole bushel
			running around our estate.

He perched almost, didn’t he?
Like that’s exactly where he intended to be.
	But no house finch,
		And barely a flush to his cheeks.

His self, 
      collected up in the moment,
      a signpost,
      a living tombstone,
a book – skewered at the gate fold – on the edge of
     the shelf


But alive! Alive, as if…
	As if his tissue just opened up around it.
Just – 
	just – 
	what?
        Spontaneously 
	        		gave way?


In lots of ways,
            he’s still there,
            would you say?

His body haunts the same streets
                                    on the estate
                 that we streaked with the carbon
                 of our tires and our brakes

Where
       we left our tears,
 and the DNA
        scraped 
           from our knees
           and our cheeks
           – and, oh yeah –  
          the snot fisted
                 from our noses,
          the roses of red gifted 
          to slake the roads’ demands in posies

The blotting of the tarmac
         hides the violence 
          and the joy
                 when we were all together.

Now altogether 
          we’re apart
                     and yet
          you and him, 
          and all of us
 	   are tattooed across my palms.

This is a diary entry from the drafting of The Indian Warrior, the story of boxer and coach Pradeep Sihag Singh. I’m finding that writing a life means following the echoes — and discovering the questions I haven’t yet asked, or haven’t asked deeply enough.

Photo credit: Egor Vikhrev

THE INDIA DIARIES. Discoveries from the making of The Indian Warrior

August is cold and beautiful. The quiet is kept but for soft splutters and creaking. Creaking of bones and of wooden things.

The echoes of Pradeep’s early life whisper along many of the lines I read through on my bright screen. I plant my feet whilst seated so my wheely chair stays put inside the designated desk dividers of the State Library of Victoria’s reading room. Winter is being denied entry as if by the same hardy methods of old – air dragged in and over hot coal before drenching everyone in deep pours from the roof.

From a village in Haryana.

Jat.

‘Huh,’ I raise my eyebrows.

Elder brother also a boxer.

Passion that became a career choice.

‘Ahem.’

Amateur turned professional.

‘Tut,’ I cross my arms. ‘And for you it was a choice, no doubt,’ I say silently as I look at his photo.

Welterweight.

Middleweight.

Super middleweight.

Bronze at the Commonwealth Games in 2006.

Second-hand envy. I recognise it. I’d like to breathe it all out of me, but its vapours hide around bends and behind great lumps of inside-things.

Involuntarily, I clamp my jaw together. There’s an alternative universe where Pradeep isn’t met at the airport and refused his ticket to join the Indian boxing team, where he is still the number one prospect arriving in Australia, where this guy still gets Bronze and Pradeep wins gold. Because he’s beaten him before. And not by baal-maan either. No. Dabdaba.

‘If it hadn’t been for his coach and what he did. I wouldn’t be here in Australia. He was well connected in government.

‘His coach hated my coach. I was just in the middle of them, I was—’

‘Collateral damage?’ I offered.

‘Yes, that’s it. Collateral damage. I knocked his student out in a state competition in the lead up to the Commonwealth games. I broke his jaw.’

I know this story. Pradeep and I have spoken about it before. It’s a central junction along this ‘path of knives’ Pradeep has traversed. Now, as we take off our boxing gloves and unravel the wraps from our hands, he’s filling in gaps for my husband, Chris.

‘He had to be the coach with the highest performing student. He spoke to his influential friend. They got rid of me.’

I’m looking inwards again and away from the screen now – sitting inside the second-hand envy. Second-hand envy, which my dear friend has not once displayed to me. For me, it’s folded in amongst the deep discomfort of injustice, but also long glugs of gratitude. If my friend’s life had gone as it should have – following this man’s script – and it were his name and photo atop this Wikipedia webpage, how different even the recipe of my own life would be.

And it’s not just second-hand envy I feel. It’s anger. The kind of anger that erupts within a family, that takes a seat at the table at every meal. You don’t greet her. But she helps herself to her own meals. You don’t include her in conversations but she always listens in, not impassively to the family’s affairs. She shapes the space.

I wouldn’t be an amateur boxer, of that I am almost certain. I wouldn’t have had six competitive fights and prepared for all the fights that didn’t end up happening either. And all of the findings and experiences that goes with those occurrences – which changes how I’ve moved through the world since. I wouldn’t have benefited from the kind of encouragement that doesn’t first expect you to be someone different from who you already are. I wouldn’t have felt the strain of practice, preparation, pressure, and performance.

‘You have to win this, Aimee.’ This is demanding coach. Demanding coach exists alongside playful coach whose eyes smile, encouraging coach whose face softens. This coach came to me straight – direct through pupils and irises – at my first Queen of the Ring tournament coming off my first loss.

It’s impossible for me – especially with my word-brain not numbers-brain to set out the likely alternative permutations of myself. The person I might have been instead. And if this were the case for me, what must have occurred inside Pradeep’s first hand experience of this unsettling reality? Whilst I’ve never witnessed this from him, I know I need to find the traces of it on Pradeep’s path.

We need to talk.

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‘We’re just going to do a bit of weeding for you, Grandad.’

‘There isn’t a single weed in my garden!’

I’d been teasing him lightly but there was agitation contracting his brow and his shoulders, I noticed. I step out through the door propped open now with a bag of compost left over from potting some time ago.

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The sun is waiting around the back of the house for us. Even in the shade here along the side path, there’s a feeling of its growing strength. I sigh as I churn and pull at a thick stem of a dandelion amongst a row of conifers, each conifer aiding and abetting undesirables behind their aprons.

I wait at least five minutes before I speak again from just outside the open door.

‘Grandad, please can you come out here and show me which bits are weeds and how best to pull them out without upsetting the other plants.’

I hear him shifting in his chair as I grab at fists-full of small weeds snuggling up to their colourful neighbours in the large pots.

My aunty and I had discussed yesterday that whilst we all make a start on the weeding and get him on his feet for a few minutes, she’ll check the fish tank isn’t leaking.

Fish tank number five in a farcical yet frustrating series of events. The last of the most recent episodes was a tinkering with decorative intent. That had led to an emergency airlift of the fish (by Phil and Dave) and then a military scale clean up and dry out of the carpet, the underlay, the floorboards – on repeat for seven days. Funny, but not so much in the moment, when you’re the ones that have to deal with it and the likelihood of the next time.

Sorry Grandad, I can’t tell you this now (because I realise I can’t challenge you in the way that I used to without upsetting you) but if this doesn’t work out, the fish are going to be put up for adoption and your Amazon account will be confiscated.

‘Yep, just get right underneath it all like that and it should all come away. That’s it.’

Off I go. As I tug at whole hunks of weeds, I discover old garden ornaments – a cherub with soil set in all its creases. A fairy.

On the morning of Day III, we take the tender across to the archaeological site of Delos where only thirty percent of the island has as yet been excavated.

Our guide, Maria, welcomes us. Her voice is soft in our headsets. ‘This is where we’ll spend most of our time. Here,’ she taps her pink nail twice against the plastic.

Delos is a sacred place. It’s the place where Leto is said to have finally found refuge to give birth to her twins – the Goddess Artemis, followed by the God Apollo.

Hera, wife of Zeus had made it impossible for Zeus’ lover, the Titan Leto, to give birth to their children anywhere in the world. Leto roamed the earth, looking for a place to settle outside the wrath of Hera. Somewhere her children could fulfil their responsibilities.

Turned away in every land, moved on. Thrust back out upon the wilds alone. It was with exhausted desperation that she came across the drifting island of Delos. Here, untouched by the curse of Hera as a place without anchor, her sanctuary was secured.

When Artemis – Goddess of the hunt, wilderness, nature, and instinct – and Apollo – God of poetry, truth, order, and civilisation – are born, Zeus honours their birth by tethering the island in place to the seabed.

Photo credit: Chloe Lefleur. (Delos lion sculpture made around 2,600 years ago.)

‘This was a thriving commercial port. Its central position in the Cyclades made it perfect for trading. You see from this house here, from the statues outside them of the homeowners, that these people were wealthy. You’ll see later that there were people from other cultures who settled here too – their gods worshiped, their transactions recorded.’

We make our way through an atrium, with pristine mosaic floors. The pillars have been reconstructed – as well as the walls above shoulder height (using the stones in this area), but the floors are original. Maria tells us that they remain so because their mosaics were made not with painted tiles but with coloured stone.

‘Please, take a seat here in the front row of the amphitheatre. Look at the system in front and behind you that would take rainwater from here and into the public cisterns that I just showed you. Here they would perform. The tragedies, of course. Comedies. Music and poetry would be performed here, also – Apollo was the god of music and poetry – he would be honoured in this space. Here, there would be public announcements for the townspeople. A civic centre.’

I sit and cover my shoulders. I take a sip of water from a bottle wet with condensation. The earth is bone-dry, fine yellow grasses sprout from stones like a thirsty reminder of tenancy here.

Maria tells us about the word ‘hypocrite’ and how that comes from the Greek word meaning actor, performer, orator.

I scan around the amphitheatre, the climbing slabs of stone – many leaning now as if mimicking the audience members once slouched here.

I retreat into my time machine. Maria’s a poet projecting powerfully into the arc of faces. She appears instead as a man, himation draped over an outreached arm, wearing the mask of a sailor, speaking the storms of an odyssey.

Would he be moving through the words or would he be choosing the ones to live in?

Would he have his mind on the ship just docked? Would he be slathering his insides with wine from Cyprus this evening? Would there be merchants from Egypt with perfume to vend?

The poet gone. It’s Grandad telling the story now. The details are muddled. He’s describing the Rock of Gibraltar. Then it’s Malta. Valletta. His father’s somewhere inside both.

‘Oh, you’re just like our Pat. Big bloody shoulders,’ he rolls his own shoulders. ‘Good swimmer, our Pat.’

I can’t help but let out a laugh. Grandad has really honed the back-handed compliment over time. His mastery lies in the truths presented. And the recipient’s lack of clarity as to whether they’ve been played or ever so lightly praised.

‘Pat was your cousin, wasn’t she, Grandad?’

Each of us pause our pulling and paring back of the plants. We’ve become a garden amphitheatre audience around him.

‘My sister,’ he says matter-of-factly.

‘You have two brothers, grandad,’ I say gently. I get the sense his memory hasn’t failed him though.

‘Yes, but Pat. Well, my grandmother brought her up like her own daughter, see. We grew up in the same house. We all used to live in the same house back then. She was Betty’s.

‘Is that Great Grandad’s sister?’

‘Yeah—In them days you couldn’t have children out of wedlock. She didn’t know Aunty Betty was her mother.’

I think of Leto then, and what she had to do to birth her children.

There’s a clatter in the bottom corner where my uncle has taken to the rampant bush with machinery.

‘Ooops! watch out for me Mum!’ My Mum says, straightening out. Her sun and soil-soaked skin is now also sweat-soaked.

‘Don’t be involving Nan in the gardening, she did enough in her time,’ I joke.

Mum goes over to straighten the mantel in which Nan’s ashes rest. We’re all smiling now. I assume we’re all drawing on similar images of when Nan used to potter on the lawn here. Collect cooking apples into a bowl. Trim back the roses. Peg sheets across the washing line whilst peering around to respond to Grandad: ‘No Johnny, you’re not having another fish tank. You’ve got a lovely dog.’

We’ve been tearing and chopping and clipping at the garden for over an hour. Sweat leaks out as if the skin has been pierced in the same place for each of us – right through the centre of the shoulder blades and out the other side. I get water for my mum to drink. My aunty drapes a cold wet towel over her head.

‘Aimee, are you not hot in that hoody?’

‘It’s a sun hoody, feel it, it’s quite light. I have to wear it. The sun’s trying to kill me.’

You remember Cliffhanger, don’t you? The moment where Sly Stallone loses his grip on his best friend’s girlfriend? Near silence. A pause in life’s soundtrack. A dropped stitch, that cannot be picked up. Only the sound of jaw clashing against jaw can be felt, if not heard.

You remember the ugly-faced desperation with which she accepts his failure?

You remember her violent grabs of the air in her descent?

Palms get sweaty just imagining the strength required to hold and be held.

I was in a similar situation.

Mmhmm. Yes. With our best friend, Stevo. There were some differences, sure.

I’m still recovering. I may have permanently bruised my obliques from the experience.

Christina O fastens herself onto the skirts of the Cyclades.

Ahead, as if the gods had been playing baseball with planetary matter, and one of them had dived bodily along the archipelago, through the bone-dry brush-covered island and – whilst skidding – held out their open palms to catch a meteorite, gathering a little golden beach between their now calcified fingers.

After the morning stepping back in time 2,700 years ago, it was high time to play on this god-crafted private beach of the present, then frolic into the future on an inflatable biscuit.

‘More prawns?

‘Oh yes please.’

‘Steak?’

‘Yepyepyep?’

‘Crab salad?’

Just nodding.

‘Oh my god, that crab salad is phenomenal.’

‘Champagne?

Then just smiling and lifting my glass from the table.

‘Aims, we’re going to get on the speed biscuit. Do you want to do it with us?’

‘Now?’ I swig.

‘I know, we’re full, but come on, it’ll be fun.’

As I get up, the chair has sunk its way into the sand lower than I’d anticipated and I almost trip.

‘Aims, can I swap life jackets, this is a bit tight?’

We swap. We use the woven handles to drag our bodies onto the biscuit, lying on all the food recently transferred from the beach picnic plates to our stomachs.

The four of us are lined up next to each other on our tummies. Chris and I are on the outsides. I turn to my right and look at my helmeted co-biscuiters and smile. I hope I don’t throw up on them. I also need a wee.

‘I’m going pull up grip,’ I say.

‘Me too,’ says Chris.

‘I’m going chin up grip,’ says Ally.

‘Hammer first for me,’ says Stevo.

We look at the speed boat driver. He wants to blast us into the horizon; you can just tell. Like any psychopath, he starts quietly, slowly and before we know it our stomachs are smashing into the waves and my feet are performing like a scorpion’s pincers from above. I’m not long for this world.

We’re laughing. The joy is increasing with the speed and the reward of managing to hold on. Then all four of us are in the water before we have a chance to wonder where exactly we left the biscuit and how we managed to all almost land on top of Stevo in the sea – Ally skimmed the top of his helmet upon entry.

‘He’s really picking up speed now, isn’t he?!’

We’re ploughing through the waves, each of us are trying to make ourselves as heavy as we can be against the fabric of the biscuit, which the biscuit bucks off one unmalleable wave after another.

‘Woah woah woah ahhhh shit we’re all goners here, he’s gonna spin us round this corner now. We’re f*cked! Ah. Ah. Ah.’

‘Oh my god. No. No. Noooo!’

The engine slows. Stevo’s off again.

‘Bahahahahaa!’ My face aches. My core is aching from the laughing. I can’t release my grip even for a second to drag the snot from my nose and cheeks. This is wild.

I might puke.

Don’t wee, Aimee. Stevo will definitely feel it.

The biscuit business continues to fill me with head-back, full body vibration laughing, that will hopefully lead to these moments staying with me as a foundational memory until my deathbed.

And then.

The moment.

The driver has had enough. He needs to up the ante. He’s sick of us laughing our guts up and yet still holding on.

The wake is huge; the turn is sharp. We’re going this way. Then that.

‘Now we really are fucked.’

Arms are starting to fatigue. Shins and hips are ricocheting off the inflatable. I’m pretending I’m on the hamstring curl machine, I’m thrusting into the wave! Bah!

‘Oh no! Guys! I’ve—

‘Shishis-shit—’

I turn to look at Stevo. I can’t do anything.

‘I’ve lost my gri—’

He’s almost suspended where he is, scratching at the air trying to stay on, trying to reach for the straps.

It’s cliffhanger all over again.

Sorry Stevo, I can’t save you.

He slides off the end.

Yes, I think this, Day III, could have been my favourite day. A favourite amongst favourites.

To Stevo, you are our best friend, I’m sorry I did nothing for you. I’m sorry on (your other neighbour) Ally’s behalf also. And I’m grateful that I had on a full and robust one piece where bikini bottoms might just have become collateral damage.

When it came to the crunch, I saved myself. I will laugh until my sides hurt at the air-scratching before your body was ejected like a volcanic fart from the derriere of the so-called speed biscuit.

In Greek mythology, it was on these waters at Mykonos that Heracles (Roman: Hercules) killed invincible giants.

I struggle to project an image now of a spewing, frothing crucible onto the honeyed rippling of the sea’s slow sojourn into evening.

‘Check out that guy’s pec implants!’

‘Pec implants! What? How do you even know that?’

‘Ahm, firstly, his singlet is leaving nothing unseen, is it. Is it? He bought that top for 1500 Euros and then thought, I might need to buy a few little extras for this one. Look how high and rounded – and fillet-like – they are. OK, does it or does it not look like a boob job?

‘I suppose, if you look really closely. Stop! We’re staring.’

The two men, about to embark upon a lap of the day beds are for now stood atop the stone steps looking out to the ocean – where our yacht is also twinkling at us – so that they can position their camera, and we can see them in profile.

‘That’s what he wants us to do. Also, yes, the traps – those too!’

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This is Scorpios where you hand over oodles of your cash money so you can catwalk towards the sunset with your extension-rodded gimbal. And people watch. As if this place were an aquarium.

I like to imagine what strangers do on a Sunday.

The woman skimming the sand spattered runway now, resplendent in pearlescent thread, is a lawyer I’m sure of it; and on Sunday she made a hidden-away wine rack out of simple steel brackets from Ikea in the slender corner cupboard in her kitchen, a command-centre-grade pegboard in her home office whilst sipping a celery water, and a batch of quinoa tray bake to freeze for back-to-work lunches.

What would the other sea life think I do on a Sunday?

Hmm what do I actually do on a Sunday?

Sundays are sometimes UFC days. Sundays are usually coffee at Sorsi e Morsi in St Kilda days, tuna and cheese toasties on the couch days. The Sunday before this trip, we were sat upright on dining chairs lined up in the Stevenson’s kitchen area pretending we’re on the tram.

‘Which station are we stopping at, boys?’

‘Balaclava!’ They chant, unprompted, in perfect synchronicity.

Balaclava is a very funny sounding suburb when uttered by two-and-a-three-quarter-year-olds reconstructing their morning’s one-stop journey – now passengers sat stationary in single file domestic seating impersonating a tram.

At Scorpios now, the sun can only be felt from beneath. Our heels have started to tamp it down in time with the sounds of goblet drums and the quick skips of rainsticks.

Staff shift through our group as if we’re simply difficult terrain to overcome.

I need a drink but just like on the yacht, the choosing is difficult. I take a sip of a zingy, gin-y, minty thing Shayya holds out to me.

‘You can just order your own, Aims,’ Nath says almost correctively.

‘I’m just deciding though,’ I say as I take a sip of his espresso martini.

Hmm. I do need a little caffeine boost. It’s gone dark and my body’s extracting all the nourishment from our magnificent meal: fresh salads, creamy tzatziki, sashimi, whole slabs of barbecued seabass, hunks of oozing pork ribs, nutty potatoes. The intensity with which the lady in the low-backed, earth-tone linen stands still though in the seconds it takes for me to decide provokes me into recency bias.

Does this woman think I yoga on a Sunday? Or does she imagine I spend my Sunday afternoons at the pub?

I retreated inwards and away from the play and the chit-chat of our group, I realise that now. I couldn’t help but feel a kind of prickling. Maybe the movement of my mind could be seen through the glass too.

Versus

By Aimee Coleman

Faster!

said the master

Go, go, go!

Outlast her,

Out-class her,

She’s your foe, foe, foe.

Don’t blast her

now, no

just get past her,

there’s disaster

if you don’t!

A catastro-

phe to see and be known,

Or else a cue to say no, no, no!

Look for rancour,

draw up its anchor;

her laughter

sets to task her –

gives a second’s worth of

scope for her cope.

Ah! under the mask a

recognisable tattler,

the mirror shows the rattler

Who? No!

It’s my face,

it’s me though –

both

Two battlers fighting over

just one rope.

‘—I’m just a little embarrassed that we got locked in our room and I had to send out an SOS to the group to get us out—’

I take in the last of the coffee-laced foam whilst I glance around the aquarium to see if anyone is watching me.

Nope. Not even as I reach one arm into the breeze; twisting, swaying.

It was a nice espresso martini. Though, I do have a high bar – our friend Smith makes the best.

‘Enjoy that?’

‘The one on the yacht earlier was better.’

We chuckle.

‘Everyone needs to know that that’s ours there,’ he deadpanned, and loudly enough for absolutely nobody to care, ‘that yacht, yes, that one that we can all see shining like a big, beautiful twinkling metaphorical phallus is the one we are all now returning to.’

‘Hahaha no one gives a rat’s arse!’

As it turns out, the ‘invincible’ giants felled by Heracles were invincible only in the places where they were birthed. Their petrified bodies are said to form the rocks upon which we now dance.

The myth is something of a Heracles x Aphrodite collab. Aphrodite, goddess of love, enticed some of the giants away from their birthplaces and led them into a collision with a club wielded by Heracles. She lured each one into her cave where Heracles was hiding. There, he slayed them, clubbed them to death.

I suddenly felt like I’d been enticed here by beauty and seduction itself and that I might also club myself to death for thinking stupid thoughts.

Tomorrow we’d be up early for our tour of the ancient island of Delos – the birthplace of Apollo, God of truth, beauty, etc and his twin Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the wilderness.

Twenty-eight hours had passed since I’d sobbed in gratitude, happiness and devastation into the chests of our two friends who’d put us on this superyacht with our closest companions and lavished a life upon us in eight days we had all tried to naturalise to. Nostrils full of sun-soaked teak, I waved back at them all lined up along the aft deck whilst laughing and crying at the same time.

Now though – mere hours later – it was my stepfather’s turn to sob. In the twenty-four years that I’ve known him, never once have I seen him cry; never mind break down like this.

His son had been arrested and the solicitor said he was unlikely to make bail.

Whilst I held my stepfather and patted his back, I said in the confines of my own mind: this is not the collision with reality I’d anticipated.

I felt sick. It stirred up the memory of visiting my cousin in prison many years ago.

Moments moiled and my stepfather let me let go of him then moved past me. He put the kettle on. ‘Right. Khhah. Who wants a brew?’

‘Yep, I’ll have a brew.’

‘Go on then, tell us about it, Mrs Superyacht. Lighten the mood.’

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I put my lips to the steaming aura of my mug. Nope, still too hot. I made a baby oval and blew across the top.

‘Winston Churchill and John F Kennedy met on the boat. They draped themselves on the barstools made of sperm whale’s foreskin. Just like we did. They discussed the future of the world. Maybe specks of their DNA could be found in the rope’s sinews at the Ari Bar.’

‘Whale’s foreskin? Bloody ’ell!’

‘Bet you had similar discussions, didn’t you?’ Mum asked, smiling.

‘To Churchill and JFK?’ I thrust my chin in towards my throat, ‘Definitely. Well, I did have a conversation at 04:00 about the role I’m applying for, laptop lopsided on unsteady legs, under the gilded-framed-gaze of Winston Churchill. But yes, apart from that, our chats were more… locally focused, I’d say. Although, we did talk more than once about who was the best footballer that has ever existed.’

‘Zidane!’

‘That’s what Chris said.’

‘What were the best bits?’ Mum kept us on track so as not to open that door again.

‘Hmmh. Do you have time? Here I go, then.’

First, we’re skidding across the Aegean Sea, rounding one of the mainland’s toes so we could take in the 100-metre unmatched beauty of the yacht, and try to imagine what kind of experiences were awaiting us as soon as we lunged from the side of the tender and onto the hydraulic platform.

There’s a welcome from the captain, crew and a four-piece band in the Maria Callas Salon where the polished surfaces pulse with Onassis family heirlooms, tomes, and the paraphernalia of thinkers and action-takers. Then lunch as we launch into the light-flushed horizon for our first anchor point.

Lunch is spectacular. Fresh fish, lobster tails, salad. Buttery wine. The band strikes its chords playfully. I look around. We’re all sitting back inhaling, grinning, holding onto something to keep from flying away.

I’m facing into the ocean wind, trying to make my eyeballs and brain bigger so I can collect it all. Bathe in it. Keep it here with me, under my skin, make enduring stents to keep my heart open to it long after the last day.

After lunch, the slide’s unfurled and inflated. We’re thrust down without ceremony, as if riding on a fist against the flesh of the sea. Communal whiplash is administered before entry tips are proffered: cross your arms across your chest, keep your neck back, tuck your chin in.

‘It’s actually better to go headfirst, then twist to your side at the end.’

‘It didn’t look like that way was better, darling.’

For days afterwards, you could recognise the sliders by their upright, forward-facing gait – and their turns into peripheral view initiated from shoulders or even further down, from torsos.

I lie back on the cool slow cadence of the tide and allow my limbs to drift away from the group a little. The water slurps softly in my ears. I think to myself: I would not jump into the deep ocean in Australia. I would not bob about giggling with my friends. I would not lie back and surrender as shark bait.

Back on deck, the wood warms from your feet to your belly button and the sun streams down from your crown to the same equator, as if in sync.

‘Can I have a Pina Colada, please?’ Brooke asked Mikola.

‘Of course,’

‘Just so you know, I had the best Pina Colada on our honeymoon ten years ago.’

‘Wow, Brookie, you’re really throwing down the gauntlet.’

By the second afternoon, long crystal glasses of sunshine colonised the Jacuzzi deck as we lounged, laughed, lived large and loud. On my preferences sheet provided by the Charter broker, I wrote that my favourite was a dirty martini. On reflection, survival over eight days requires something less serious. Turns out my Greek-island-sojourn-on-a-superyacht cocktail is a Piña Colada. And a humble Mythos beer or two can go a long way.

That evening, during and after dinner, Emily Johnson performed for us – ambient at first, then central. Like the moon, she pulled us in waves towards her.

Mid-set, those of us nearside of the pool deck, were pulled in by the almost fictitious portrayal of the actual moon though, enthroned as it was like a monolith atop the dramatic promontory on which the Temple of Poseidon, God of the sea, reigns. Us, our yacht, the only ones at the cinema.

You can’t see from here, but Lord Byron’s scratched his name in one of the pillars.

For me, the reverberating highlight of Emily’s performance – and of the first night as a whole – was her quiet stewardship and backing vocals to what became Brenton’s bold and brave edition of R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

‘You’re all my bitches. You all know that.’

The music, the dancing, the laughing continued until late-late. The 12-5am club had its inaugural session.

When we wake in the morning, we’ll be peeping at Mykonos.

Photo credit: emiliano cicero

It goes like this…

I see a little white house

On the big black rocks of Tenerife.

I smell the algae resting

On the pebbled pools where you crouch.

You carry water from a well in a canister;

Carefully clutching its ears,

Wanting not a droplet of waste.

You have the clothes on your back

And a mind full of spanners, hammers and twine.

You feel the squelch of soaked soil,

See it bubble up between this and that toe,

Like warmed chocolate.

Between the sea grass and the horizon

Are the animals tag-teaming in and out of life;

Plants plunging lower to taste the rain.

A way away, you know they’re spraying out

Ingeniously,

Flowering just so;

To help trap bees in their sugared flutes,

To stick pollen pockets on their backs,

To keep life going in every direction.

I see you fight even though you lose sometimes;

I see you make do.

This is everything,

And everything you need to do.

You clamp your hands around fish bellies,

Fresh from a foamed net,

You place three of them in a stone bowl;

And the seaweed you hold in your other hand

For later;

Its emerald tails trailing in the sand.

You roll up the net and stretch it out again

On the fence you made from old posts,

Beached;

Too beaten and defeated

To do ought but lie there

Horizontal;

Debris of old bowed legs,

Fit only to support this ropey veil

Until the night unzips.

When the sun bows out,

You rub your muscles

And you comb the salt from your hair.

Smile;

Tomorrow night, you might

Shampoo once, twice!

And delight in the

Softness and scent,

A fluffy halo under which to sleep.

I’ve seen you make traps from straw,

Strip birds of their feathers,

Take what you need and

Lay the rest to rest.

You draw in the black sand,

Make statues from it,

Palaces you thought you needed back then.

My dream for you

Was that you might stand

On your own two;

Head to the clouds,

Shoulders earthed by calloused hands;

Legs that could plough fields;

A body that could stalk caribou

Through silver forests;

A thumb and forefinger that could pluck a rabbit

From the dunes,

With a bow broad enough,

A back bold enough

To feel the full force

Of everything.

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Photo credit: Naveena V

I’m home now. At my desk, I wonder if the khaat still has its back up along the wall of the roof – where I’d sheltered it (and myself) against the sun’s spread – facing the yard. The woven outdoor bed had listened as my nails clipped the keyboard, had held me and my laptop in place until my glutes softened into numbness. It was a meeting spot for me, Olivia, Oscar, and Daivik to negotiate activities and entertainments. It was a place for tea where Sam, Pradeep and I would make loose plans for the day.

Away from the gaze of the macaque, from the slices of stillness demanded by the kingfisher, I’m revisiting observations I scribbled. I try to regather the scenes and their feelings, then match words to my experiences, then make sense of them. I’m re-seeing, re-hearing, re-smelling, re-touching, re-tasting.

And though I’m here, I’m still there. On the khaat, cross-legged, then straight-legged, then bent-legged with my feet on the brick floor.

It was mealtime. Pradeep’s mum passed me more dahl, I think she said: eat more, daughter. Smiling, I reach out for the metal bowl, then tear off another chunk of roti.

‘Pradeep, please ask your mum how she felt when you left for Australia.’

I listened and watched.

She sits back for a second, a slight pause, spoon in hand before she continues to feed her clan.

Pradeep’s eyes and ears are taking everything in too – as if for the first time.

She said, Aimee, that she cried every day for a year. She said I didn’t speak to her for a year when I left.

I swallow some curd along with what feels like the preparation of tears. Seeing them altogether, how close they are, how much they do for each other and how much love they share around, I’m suddenly transported back to over 20 years ago when Pradeep would have been sat here, bag next to the khaart as he shovelled in his last of his mother’s meals, not knowing what was coming next and having nothing but his own experiences and his own will to get him there. His mum features in many of his anecdotes about female strength and power. This new information doesn’t fit and I’m looking for clues in both of their postures and gestures.

I had to swallow again before asking, neutrally, ‘why didn’t you speak to your mum for a year?’

‘Because I had nothing to say. I was boxing, that is all I was doing. I trained, I drank cordial so I could train, and I went to sleep. Yeah, I—’

‘I could cry now if I let myself,’ I said. I’m not exactly what you might call an impassive interviewer.

‘Yeah,’ Pradeep let his shoulders loosen, ‘I didn’t know she was crying every day. I called every week, but I only spoke with my dad. There’s just one phone for me to contact, my dad’s, we didn’t speak long. I told him everything was fine, I was training every day, and he told mum.’

A few nights ago Sandeep had given me two diaries he’d kept from 2004. In it he had copied a letter Pradeep had sent from Australia with a loving message for Bhabhi-ji, Ravita, for her impending marriage to Virender. He translated and red aloud that letter where Pradeep described his gym, people he cared about, specifically calling out people who were a ‘good person’, who’d helped him with the gym or accommodation.

‘I was like that before I went to Australia though. I would be away on campus somewhere and when everyone left to go back home for the holidays or festival or whatever, I would stay and I would train. I had to be forcibly removed from the barracks in Delhi by a senior boxer.’

Obsession is a common thread in the conversations we’ve had to date. It’s a mindset that is difficult to quantify. Unconsciously I haven’t really been able to quantify in words the level of obsession beyond number of fights, beyond describing the patterns of training, beyond the hours of repetition and training. The accumulation of artefacts like this letter that Sandeep diligently copied, these surprising conversations with all his family will help me better quantify this obsession.

‘Papa, can I have more Makhan?’

‘Makhan, makhan, makhan!’

Pradeep heads over to Ravita-ji who dollops a round lump of the just-churned butter. She gives him another hot roti to act as a lid to help it liquify, just how they like it.

***

‘Pradeep, please will you ask your mum to tell me about when you drowned? How old were you. What happened.’

I watch as she indicates with her hand how old he’d have been by his height. Smaller than Olivia and Oscar. Maybe four.

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The day was a typical summer day in the village. Virender and Pradeep chased each other through the house, up and down the stone steps, across the roof avoiding the cow dung cakes drying out in the section exposed to the sun for the majority of the day. Sandeep was at an age where he spent most of his time being nourished by their mother.

In the early afternoon, Pradeep’s grandfather, Pyarelal Sihag, had asked him to come along with him to take the buffalo to the watering hole. The clasp of the gate rang out as Pradeep stood on tiptoes to release the lock.

Out into the lane the smell of rot and open gutters rose as the heat did. A skimpy brood of chickens dunked their feet and feathers in the quaggy waste to stay cool.

Both Pradeep and Pyarelal patrolled the buffalo from the rear; their hides stretched shiny across their hips. He admired the bright white cotton of his grandfather’s kurta and salwar, and his chaadar, which for now he held in his left hand.

‘Good running this morning, grandson. You’re fast.’

His grandfather’s praise inflated him like a helium balloon.

Pradeep tapped the right thigh of the buffalo upfront to turn onto the path to the pond. A neighbour passed in the other direction.

‘Namaste. Are you not joining us for cards today?’ Pyarelal greeted.

‘No, it’s a wedding. My cousin’s nephew.’

‘Very good. Enjoy that.’

‘Hmm. They don’t make very good food. No taste to it. I ought not to go.’

Pyarelal nodded and continued on.

When they arrived at the square opposite the bus stop where the elders gathered for their card games, there was a squabble between two of the three men recently arrived. It seemed to be about the preparations for the harvest just gone; one saying that the other should have heeded his advice about the windstorm that wiped out acres.

Pradeep left his grandfather to mediate and guided the buffalo the last 50 metres or so to the oasis where already, black shiny heads bobbed about. He watched as the buffalo at the front plodded down the slick ramp and immersed herself by degrees, in contrast to the two directly behind who seemed to jump clumsily at her shoulders in a race to cool down.

At the water’s rim, Pradeep poised as he’d seen sprinters on the TV do. He dug his fingertips into the dirt, shot his hips out and backwards, looked left and right to his imaginary opponents, then, poof! He shot off as fast as he could. He jogged back to recapture his breath. Again, he pressed into the ground with his fingers, shook out one leg and then the other, just as he’d seen the professional athletes do, then dipped down and pow! Quicker this time, he thought. Returning to his start line, he checked again on the buffalo, and repeated and repeated and repeated. He could see the elder men silent now, concentrated on cards fanned out in their palms.

His throat was dry and sweat trickled briefly before the sun turned it back into air. How he’d love to join the buffalo. He stood at the lip again and curiosity perhaps drove him to place one foot onto the ramp. He hadn’t expected the ramp to be greasy. Underfoot, it was as if the descent into the watering hole had been slicked with mekhan. Of course, even the most well balanced, athletic kids can be deceived into a gloopy abyss by curiosity alone.

The water was thicker than he thought, too. Two parts rainwater, one part mud. Kicking his legs was tiring and pulled his upper body down. He’d already expended so much explosive power in his sprint practice. Viscous, the sludge soon overtook him; he tipped his head back to keep his nostrils open but relaxing his muscles seemed like an acceptance of defeat. He kicked harder and harder, and beat his fist beneath the surface, his frantic breaths no doubt merged with the noises of the buffalo, his urgent shouts towards the end probably sounded like the regular screeches of a young boy keeping his buffalo in check or keeping himself entertained.

When the realised he was drowning. He’d drowned. It was done. When they pulled him out, mud had clumped his airways shut. His grandfather scooped him into his arms and drove his limbs into the earth ferociously in a dash back to their home.

‘Get the doctor! Help me! He’s gone!’

Pradeep’s mother shifted Sandeep from her hip to the khaart and ran to them. Pyarelal scraped his fingers up Pradeep’s nose. Pradeep’s mother flushed his mouth.

He felt his pulse.

Nothing.

She tapped his cheeks. Shook his shoulders. She felt his pulse.

Nothing.

Pradeep’s father came crashing through the gate, dragging the doctor by his cuff.

The doctor checked his pulse at his neck and wrist.

‘He is gone.’

Pradeep’s mum dropped to the floor. She repeated what she’d done before.

Pradeep’s dad carried him to the bed and laid him there.

‘He was dead between 2pm and 9pm,’ Pradeep translated now. She shook her head, daring me not to believe.

‘How can that be?’ I ask, a little more demanding than I intend.

‘She doesn’t know. She says the doctor, he’s the doctor in the village, he came, he tried your pulse, your airways were blocked. He said you were gone.’

She says she tried to clear them, my airways. She lay next to me. She washed me. She held me. She took a cloth to my nose and mouth.

‘I pressed your chest. I told you to come back,’ she said impassively now.

She must have fallen asleep with the dead weight of grief. At nine o’clock, I touched her arm.

‘In Herat a man can’t stretch out his leg without touching a poet’s backside.’ - Babur (founder of the Mughal empire).

There’s a reverence – a density even – of art, literature, philosophy and mysticism in the world Babur came from, and carried with him into the early Mughal empire, that fascinates me.

Whilst writing ‘The Indian Warrior,’ I’ve been learning a little about Indian history; about Ashoka, the ruler who played a crucial role in spreading Buddhism beyond India; about Babur, Humayun, Akbar, and Aurangzeb of the Mughal era; about the East India company and the uprising of 1857.

Going to Humayun’s tomb was special.

I’ve a soft spot for Humayun. He was the son of Babur, who originated from what is now Uzbekistan and founded the Mughal empire in India. Humayun was a poet and astrologer, he travelled with library, he enjoyed a party, and he lost everything. He was driven into exile by Sher Shah Suri, navigated the betrayal of his brothers (whom his father is said to have made him promise on his deathbed not to harm), overcame the weakened Sur Empire through his strategic allegiance with the Safavids and rebuilt the empire in spite of it all.

The walk into the museum at Humayun’s tomb builds anticipation. The day is agitating towards its white-blue ceiling and we’re slinking down into the cool mouth of the museum through a dark wood tunnel.

I could roam through here like a snail, leaving a windy silver trail of loops and lines. No need for water or food, these glittery things, these could sustain me. When I need rest, I could dwell under the life-sized replica canopy from Humayun’s court – the twinkling of the pearlescent tiles would lull me to sleep. Not really. They wouldn’t allow that. The Museum guard is already following us – Olivia is on my back – as I point to sections of artworks beneath glass that have beautiful flowers and colours on.

‘Don’t touch.’

I retract my pointing finger so it’s one more centimetre away from the surface of the – I notice that Olivia engages more when I point to specific parts of the textile, or the pot, or the tile, or the beautifully intricate canopy, or the to-scale replica the drum underneath Humayun’s Tomb.

‘Wow. Look at this beautiful crown, Olivia.’

‘It is beautiful. Is it a hat? Look at those gold flowers,’ Olivia responds.

It does look more like a hat than a crown as we know it. It has architectural qualities too. The gold embroidery seems to emit its own light, soaked as it is in the deep vibrancy of the crimson on which it sits. It’s the Taj-i-Izzat and it really is beautiful. It was designed by emperor Humayun. Beside this luxurious crown is a display of his wardrobe – colour coded according to his astrological beliefs relating to the planet governing the day of the week. Tuesdays were Mars. He’d wear red and tend to matters of justice.

I catch the artwork by Persian artist Mir Sayyid Ali of The Princes of the House of Timur (c1550-1555) on the screen. It’s a picnic in a garden, with Humayun in the centre pavilion. Opposite are his son, Akbar, grandchild Jahangir, and great-grandchild Shah Jahan, who are said to have been added in later. It was painted with opaque watercolour. The image on the screen shows the blank space where the painting was cut.

We’ve to move quickly if we have a hope of keeping all the kids interested. I nudge Olivia up my back slightly, pull up her cat blanket so it’s not dragging on the floor, and gather Daivik from the space he’s about to reimagine as a runway. I take in as many artefacts as I can – I scan each cabinet like I’m skim-reading and make a note of the things I want to find out about later.

Sam’s carrying Oscar ahead of me and Sandeep is guiding Reyansh and Daivik towards the exit. Sandeep scans each of our tickets again as we pass through the third turnstile so far.

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‘Aimee, you should have a guide. It will be very interesting,’ Sandeep suggests with a nod and motions for me to follow the guide.

There’s a breeze that draws through the main walkway as if an exhale from the lungs of the tomb itself.

‘What are those birds?’ I point to the four or five large aviators above.

‘They’re eagles. In England you call them Kites, I believe.’

‘There are so many of them. And crows, too.’

I imagine an eagle landing on my shoulders and dipping its beak into the free-flowing sweat from my neck, back and the small water-baths collecting in my inside elbows.

A woman in a sun-drained abaya with a silky-faced baby edges toward Sam. She smiles at her as if she were an old friend, or someone she’d wished to meet for a very long time. She asks Sam for a photo with her family.

‘That Banyan you’re pointing to, that is five hundred years old. When we go through to the grounds in a few moments, there is a banyan that’s a thousand years old there, yes.’

‘Sam, did you hear that, 500 years old!’

We walk through to the Char Bagh – the four gardens in the centre of which rises Humayun’s tomb – people gather under the archway and take photos. Our guide motions for me to join him at a better, more shaded spot with a clearer view of the tomb building flanked by the waxy green of trees spotlighted in our foreground.

‘Char Bagh means “Four gardens”. Can you see each east and west, north and south? Yes. Can you see the surrounding water channels?’ Our guide talks about these important aspects of the tomb that relate to the Muslim faith. He says that Muslims don’t believe in reincarnation, and as such this mausoleum is the final resting place of the body. He describes how this all been designed to represent paradise.

This was commissioned by Humayun’s wife, the empress. See, it was a woman who commissioned this work of art! Yes.’

I nod in appreciation of his acknowledgement of girl power.

‘This is the inspiration for the Taj Mahal. This took eight years to build and cost about 1.5 million rupees. The Taj Mahal took 22 years to build. When you visit the Taj Mahal, you will see it is grander, but this, Humayun’s tomb was the preparation for that masterpiece. Inside this tomb is simpler – the materials are red sandstone and white marble. The Taj Mahal, however, is inlaid with many, many precious stones and cost about 40 million rupees. But when you see it, you will know that this was clearly the inspiration 80 years earlier.’

He urges me to go up to the tomb, to see where Humayun has been laid to rest. He describes how the body is buried 10-15 ft below the surface. He says that I will see many other Mughal family and court members’ graves too; a “dormitory of Mughals”.

I climb up the acutely steep stone steps towards the tomb proper. I’m glad I don’t have a child on my back for this. At the top, I walk in through the doorway and the patchwork of light and shadow created by the Jaali screens. I open up my own lungs to the chamber’s lungs – from each side of the octagon, cool air is channelled in and out.

In the centre, beneath the deep concave of the dome roof, lies the white marble cenotaph of Humayun. There are small clumps of tourists around the edges all seemingly drawn to different vistas: the patterned platform upon which the cenotaph is laid, the curve of an arch, the detail of the latticed screen, the cavernousness of the dome above. The relief of the draught.

When I return to the garden, I ask my guide who’s resting straight legged on the edge of the garden wall: ‘Are the bodies still there?’

‘Of course. For the Muslim faith a body cannot be moved, this is the final resting place as I described before.’

In Meerut, I spent a lot of time with our host’s daughter. She guided me to the room I’d be staying in. After letting my bag slope down from my shoulder, I commented on a framed picture of a woman frozen in dance. ‘This is lovely.’

‘I made that,’ and after a pause she added: ‘Would you like to see one of my sketchbooks?’

‘I’d love to.’

The A5 ring-bound notebook featured more mandala artworks; stamps of deep blues, reds, bruised purples, glossy oranges and yellows; dreamy watercolour skies around hardlines of what may have been Japanese-inspired architecture; portraits of Shiva and Parvati, ‘that’s my favourite one,’ she said, ‘the masculine and the feminine’.

‘Is that Krishna? I ask’

‘No, that’s Rama.’

‘Ah okay. Is that who Hanuman protects?’

‘Yes. You know about Hanuman?’

‘Just a tiny bit. I read a short story: when Hanuman saves Rama’s brother by moving the mountain with the herb he needs to bring him back to life.’ I emphasise the word mountain and I carry an invisible prototype of it in my tilted hand.

‘Yes! I’m impressed. You know about Indian mythology.’

‘Only a little. I’ve been learning about Indian history in small bites – ancient and modern and then the Mughals in between,’ I summarise. ‘I recently read the story from the Mahabharat about the Kauravas and the Pandavas.’

‘You asked about Krishna before, he drives the chariot and guides the Pandavas strategically in their war with the Kauravas. I think you will love a book I have; it’s from Draupadi’s perspective – she was the wife—’

‘—The wife of the Pandava brothers,’ I finished.

‘Yes. Exactly. All five of them. I have read only a few chapters but I’m really enjoying it. The title is: The Palace of Illusions. Draupadi was born from fire, and she has a very important role in the Mahabharat, but I don’t think she’s given the attention she deserves and this book does this.’

‘Sounds great.’

‘I would like to gift it to you.’

‘But you haven’t read it yet.’

‘It’s OK. I want you to have it. I think you will love it. I will buy myself another one.’

Upender will compete in the state championships at the weekend – we’ll go to Delhi. Pradeep-Kaka will be in his corner. He’ll also appear as Chief Guest at the event.

Before we get in the car, we devour lunch of creamy dahl with beans, crispy and slightly spicy ochre, roti, and kheer. There’s curd to drink too. By the time I’ve torn my last piece of roti – the next batch of which has been made by Ravita, and is being rolled by Anu before being placed in the tawa on top of the smoking chulha by Pradeep’s mum – and scooped up the last of the ochre, my body is content. And then there’s kheer, whose sugary milky almondy rice has become one of my favourite dishes. Inevitably, I make room.

At lunch yesterday, I looked up from the plentiful plate of roti, cucumber, tomatoes to see a familiar posture from coach as he and Upender spoke in Haryanvi. I know this conversation. I know it from the way Pradeep is standing with his hands clasped – shoulders rolled forward, outer hand a clasp for the inner. I know it from the postures coach and student assume. I know it from the reach and focus in the eyes.

He’s asking Upender: ‘What’s the plan?’

I turn to Sam to say that whilst I don’t understand the words passing between them, I recognise the discussion.

‘I’m so proud of you, beta,’ Pradeep says and holds his nephew’s shoulders.

Pradeep turns to us then: ‘He said he’s going to be aggressive, he’s going to come forward, use pressure, use his jab, see what his opponent has to offer him – and respond to that.’

Sam and I nod. It’s a solid plan.

We drive through the hot afternoon in the cool of the airconditioned car. The duelling of the kids and their noises, their chats, their shouts, becomes a kind of fluorescent vibrating audio wallpaper to our trips.

We stop for coffee. The kids crawl over each other to arrange themselves then plunge heavy spoons of pink ice cream into their mouths.

‘Upender’s fight should be around 3pm. He weighed in this morning, he’s feeling good. Virender said it’s very hot there at the stadium. We’ll stay at Anu’s brothers whilst we wait – it’ll be too hot at the venue for us all.’

We arrive at the apartment building around 1pm and as soon as our bottoms hit the comfy sofa, there is first pani, then tea and sweets, then samosas.

‘This area is famous for samosas. Do you like?’

Lunch before we left could keep me going until late evening, but of course these samosas look too good to miss. Sandeep prepares one for me, breaking it up with a spoon and mixing in chutney. ‘This green one is spicy, would you like to try?’

‘Yes please.’

Of course it’s the best samosa I’ve ever had. Spicy, sweet and salty. The chunks of thin, deep-fried crust cleave the rest of the filling together and apart.

After the samosas and snacks, there is juicy watermelon.

The tea has a punch of ginger to match the masala and I take smaller sips for practical and impractical reasons. The former: I’m full (and even if I’d wanted to resist, I’d be hard-pushed); the latter: I want to bathe my tastebuds in it slowly over the longest possible time.

We watch the kids play. Our host, Pinky, pulls out reinforcement soft toys from a cloth bag that she rests on her baby bump, after the kids begin to fight over Olivia’s Skye dog.

As a diversion, Pradeep starts a press up tournament amongst the cousins. He positions himself in the line formed by the boys. Olivia jumps onto his back.

At 27, coach is out. The rest of the kids continue until one of them gets caught by a stray leg. Some diplomacy is required to keep things on track, and then:

‘Tournament cancelled!’

Reyansh separates himself from the younger ones who are angry and volatile – he commits himself instead to squats. He counts in English. At fifty, I thought he’d take a bow. I offer a clap of encouragement. He pulls up his trousers at the back and continues.

‘Seventy-ss-’ he lowers his body still and searches his mind for the number.

‘Seventy-six,’ his dad picks up the count briefly and hands it back to Reyansh so as not to halt progress.

The count continues. His father confirms his count with ‘hmm’ each time.

At one hundred, I offer another little clap.

‘One hundred and six’ Reyansh says.

‘One hundred sixteen,’ his dad encouragingly corrects.

By one hundred and eighty-five, sweat starts to shake itself free from Rayansh’s hairline.

At two hundred, I again offer a clap. His father too. I don’t know for sure but I get the sense from body language that his father has also said something to the effect of: that’s great, you’ve done enough now, but Reyansh wants to continue. It’s getting harder, the squats are slightly slower, the sweat looser now.

‘Two hundred thirty… Thirty two, thirty three…’

It’s clear he’s going to persevere to two hundred and fifty. We amplify ‘two hundred and fifty!’ and still he plunges low, his heels at angles, he pulls up his trousers at the back once his butt touches the floor.

He takes a gulp of air in and carries on.

‘Three hundred,’ four of us shout.

‘Three hundred and one,’ he finalises.

We all shift in our seats, we smile at one another.

I ask Pinky, Anu’s brother’s wife, when she’s due.

She shifts her head from side to side and states a date in May.

I nod.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I feel relaxed. Yes.’ She nods sweetly.

We watch the kids as their energy bursts out in all angles across the apartment. One breaks out of the locomotive running on collective steam.

The sound of Pradeep’s phone adds a soundtrack to the motion. ‘That was Virender. It’s only fight number 45. Upender’s fight will not be until around 5pm.’

We adjust ourselves.

I send Chris a message. I miss him very much.

As if the last of the air in the balloon has seeped out imperceptibly, Pinky and I are suddenly alone in the apartment.

I ask Pinky about her work and what she studied. She studied law but was not practicing before she then married and they had their first child. ‘I would like to go back to finish my studies. It may be five to seven years, I think,’ she adds.

We’re quiet for a little while, she gets up to bring me more refreshments, which I tell her I don’t need. She sits back down, we talk about vitamins and protocols she uses to keep her gestational diabetes in check, then her neighbour comes around.

Her neighbour tells me she’s a nurse, she works in gynaecology. She adds with a laugh that she was very excited about becoming a nurse but says the reality isn’t what she’d hoped. ‘Oh my god!’

Her neighbour invites me around to her place next door. I’m introduced to her husband, her friend and her friend’s child. We chat for a while. I’ve left my phone next door. I hope that when everyone returns from their impromptu trip to the park (the reason for everyone’s impromptu exit of the apartment before) I don’t get left behind. There are many of us here – it’s easier than you’d think to forget one.

‘What do you think of India?’

‘I love it.’

“How do you like the food.’

‘It’s the best!’

‘What’s your favourite dish?’

‘I like all of it. I especially like kheer.’

They smile. I add: ‘am I saying it correctly? K-ee-rr (I try to roll my r a little). It’s with rice, milk, almonds.

‘Yes, yes. Shall we make you some, now?’

‘No, no, thank you. I’m full. I have just eaten lots.’

‘Have you tried Pani Puri?’

‘No, I haven’t yet.’ There’s a look of mild shock on each of their faces.

‘Shall I take you to the best place, now? We can walk there.’

‘No, thank you so much, we are going to a boxing tournament. I’ll have to be heading back in a minute or two.’

‘Do you like wearing the bangles?’

‘Yes I do. It’s customary for married women to wear these, I was told.’

‘Yes. It is. I find them difficult to wear.’ Pinky’s neighbour is dressed in jeans and a t-shirt.

‘They are quite noisy. People know you’re around,’ I say.

‘Do you have a sari?’ she adds.

‘I don’t but I will make sure I get one before I leave—’

There’s a knock at the door. Sandeep is here. We’re going to the tournament now.

Five minutes into the journey, Pradeep receives a call. ‘Upender’s opponent has pulled out. He’s been given a walk over. His next fight will be tomorrow. We just spent five hours in the car and then waiting for no fight!

‘Such is boxing,’ I say. In Australia, you don’t always know you’ll be fighting until you’re in the ring. Ah, so it’s a global thing, I say to myself.

‘I will need to go as Chief Guest. Aimee, are you coming with me?’

‘Yes, definitely.’

When we arrive, we’re surrounded by people who know and respect Pradeep. He’s shaking hands, people are taking photos, four young men – active boxers – guide us through and into the area where two rings stand upon platforms. There are two bouts happening.

As I’m handed a garland of marigolds – my great-grandmother’s favourite flower – I see the junior male in the blue corner take a blow which sends his head backwards and his feet skip in retreat. The referee heads over to him and waves his arms in stoppage.

We’re lead to the stage. There are phones pointing at us from multiple directions. Pradeep is holding a piece of vibrant cloth in place whilst one of the young men wrap and then knot a headpiece for him. The older lady next to me asks me quietly where I’m from. She asks me about Pradeep, I tell her he’s from Sisai, Haryana, that he became a professional in Melbourne, Australia, and now he owns a gym there.

It’s my turn for a headdress. More photos. Pradeep is introduced to the audience who are no longer really watching the matches, they’re watching him. We’re led to the middle of the ring on the right.

‘Aimee, you just need to touch both of their gloves, like this.’ We stand next to the boxers about to compete, their coaches and the referee. We smile for the camera.

‘Best of luck to both of you,’ Pradeep says. I echo.

‘OK, shall we go, Aimee? This way.’

It’s harder to get out than it was to get in. Pradeep’s old training partners, fans, up and coming boxers want to introduce themselves, shake his hand, take photos. We move through a shifting path.

‘Aimee, these two are national champions, they would like to take a photo with us.’

‘Best of luck to you both,’ I say and follow Pradeep as he edges further towards the car. At the car, another huddle of people collects. I see a space open up in front of the back door and slip inside. Pradeep shakes hands with haste and gets in the car. The kids are upset. Voices hoarse now, they want to know why papa was chief guest, why he took so long.

When we arrive, it’s quiet. Delhi airport is either not quite yet awake or has not yet been to sleep. Our arrival is welcomed by Pradeep’s family, all wrapped around the centre of the barrier, shoulder to shoulder and smiling with all of themselves. His nieces and sisters-in-law reach out to us gently and we hug. I could have been returning home, too.

We wait outside for the minibus driver. ‘He’s from the village. He said he doesn’t know where he’s going. He hasn’t been to Delhi airport before. We just need to wait,’ Pradeep said and we return to our chatters and smiles. I pat the little ones gently on the head and back.

Our luggage is piled into the cavity behind the seats and when that is fit to burst, onto the seats at the back.

‘Are there enough seats?’ asked Sam first, then Pradeep.

Hazy from our trip through the clouds, I couldn’t even work it out but had a sense there might need to be some kids on laps. After some assessing, some shifting, some wedging of suitcases and tucking of bags, the sum seemed to tip back into the neutral, and four people ended up fitting in the space anyway.

‘I want Dadi to meet us at the airport,’ Pradeep’s daughter, Olivia said.

‘But she’s seventy years old sweetie! You can give her her present when we get to the village.’

‘When will that be?’

‘I don’t know. We will stop and eat in about an hour.’

‘Is it a long journey, papa?’

‘Ha, betee.’ Yes, daughter.

The kilometres of tunnels we drive through are brightly decorated murals, expressions of the states across India.

We stop.

We’re still in the tunnel and there’s an exit coming up on the right, yet we are now stopped in the left lane as traffic continues to move. We haven’t broken down, have we?

There’s back and forth between the driver and Pradeep’s elder brother who flicks his finger towards the exit.

We carry on.

For miles we pass squares of green, a long iterative green, becoming ripe as we move.

Barely hours into our arrival, I realise our book is going to have to change. It’s going to become something else. This is not how I’d expected things, in ways I’m not yet able to articulate. So this is going to be hard for me to describe. And not just because writing a book is hard. Not just because it’s hard to describe in words all of the layers and nuance of people and places and paths. The village is a communal organism, when you walk into the house, you walk straight into rooms with beds to sit and recline on, to convene, to communicate.

The uneven roads are lined by buffalo and cows in motion or tied to the walls outside houses or to posts staked through the mud of yards. They provide the milk so crucial in the vegetarian diet here.

‘Why does the man have a stick, mama? Is it to hurt the cows?’

‘No it’s just to guide them in the right direction across the road.’

‘What’s ‘guide’, is that bad?’

‘No, this is guiding: if I put my arm out like this but I don’t touch you, you would go that way, wouldn’t you.’

There are schools, shops with packets of snacks like streamers covering the entrances as if proving shade from the sun, structures built from cow pat cakes or kanda, part finished buildings and piles of bricks from which to draw, abandoned lots, the deeply baked smell of smoke from the chulhas.

Pradeep’s mother and father receive us at the gates; I follow Sam and Pradeep’s lead and touch each of their feet. They each rest their hands on our heads, and Pradeep’s mum gives us a hug like we’re her own.

***

Hansi is awake.

When we make our way through, our driver too is reawakened.

It goes something like this.

By now the heat can be felt from above and beneath. The ground’s surface is constantly in flux; from being seated in the dirt to lithe on the draughts of vehicles, cattle, carts and the steady plod of people. The air here isn’t transparent; there’s earth and fire in it.

Between the two lanes, our driver tries to make haste. The driver in front whether out of ignorance or spite tries to make a similar move at a similar time. And like the crack of a whip, a grudge appears. A succession of six go cart moves unclasps both our vehicles from their natural flow and the threat of a potent lash rings out.

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Millimetres are what’s available in the acute angle suddenly scratched into the dirt by the driver in front as he ejects himself. I think to myself, this is a high-risk bus to take umbrage with. There are warriors here.

This guy looks like he doesn’t give a rat’s arse and in amongst the cloud of pollutant words exchanged, the other driver slaps ours.

Virender steps forthrightly out of the minibus and around the other driver’s vehicle. Around the police who’ve closed in merely to observe, Virender points out to the drivers, hand raised, palm open as if to carry the words further, that they wouldn’t be driving like this if they were driving their own cars, that they’re taking unnecessary risks because they don’t care if they crash. He makes his point simply and assertively and after a few more words the other driver gets back into car and drives off.

We drive behind him for the next two or three kilometres.

***

With late afternoon, visitors drop by.

‘Samantha, there are ladies here; they have come to meet you both.’

We go downstairs. On the bed in the first room, a woman dressed in a goldish kurta with crimson trim and trousers is sat. She smiles; Sam and I say our names. The woman talks to us in Haryanvi.

Anu, Sandeep’s wife helps to translate: ‘She says do you remember her, Samantha.’

‘Yes, I do recognise her.’

Our visitor speaks again. When Pradeep’s father walks past the room she covers her face with her head scarf.

‘She is asking if you are married,’ Anu offers.

‘Yes.’

‘Yes.’

There’s chatter amongst Pradeep’s mum, Anu, and our visitor. After a few minutes, Anu adds: ‘For us, when married, it’s compulsory to wear bangles.’

‘Ah, OK.’ We both look down at our naked wrists. I wonder if my Fitbit and my hair tie count.

‘She wants to know, do you have children?’

‘Yes. Two,’ says Sam and our visitor smiles widely.

When I say no, there is some chatter from her and a nudge towards my midsection. I guess, somewhat thankfully, that Anu may not have the words in English.

***

‘There’s a wedding in the village tomorrow.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘We’ll all go.’

‘Really? All of us? Do you know them?’

‘Yeah. It’s Ravita’s brother’s son is getting married.’

‘Do we need to do anything or bring anything?’

‘No, Aimee. Food is provided for everyone. We will be guests of the groom. It is chulha nyond, which means all family of the groom is invited.

Our bangles seem to rattle in unison, a windchime announcing our arrival. We’re welcomed by women seated on two rows of beds facing each other. Pradeep lets us know that this area is for women – and there are younger women swiftly flicking their head dresses over their faces in anticipation – so he’ll meet us through the other side of the house. Vidhi guides us through rooms of the house, where a beautifully sugary smell peels out as a signal of the path to the gathering proper.

When we enter the ballooned yellow marquee where the groom’s guests are gathered, Vidhi, Pari and Upender are – as always – helping us all settle, making us comfortable, collecting chairs, passing refreshments, asking us which of the aromatic fare we’d like to try.

‘Chapati? Mixed vegetables? Rice? Sweets? Raita?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

Enormous pots bubble. Tongues tingle, and stomachs smile.

Raita is a yoghurt drink here, which took a few sips to rearrange in my mind.

When we’ve eaten, we ladies rest together on a bed and a large cart in one of the house’s bedrooms. Framed family collages line the upper section of each wall.

I smile to myself as I imagine dropping in as an unplanned guest at a wedding in Melbourne or Manchester. I doubt you’d be fed and refreshed so thoroughly.

***

‘I will tell you, Aimee. I just need some time.’ This from Pradeep’s brother.

The pause we hold between us is pulsing with words not yet spoken.

‘It all started with our grandfather. And then our father. Our grandfather, he was the state champion in discus, shotput and running. Every day, he would ask us – eight or nine of us brothers and cousins – to run and do sports with him. He would give us each one rupee per day.’

There’s joy on his face in the telling.

I responded, continuing the thread: ‘Pradeep told me that your cousin, after a short while, he decided he didn’t want to do any more running, so he said to your grandfather, ‘I won’t be running tomorrow or the next day, or the day after…’

Sandeep smiled widely, nodding, in his own recounting: ‘Yes, yes: so kindly settle my account,’ he finished the anecdote so beautifully that I laughed out loud.

Pradeep rejoined us then and I recapped our conversation.

‘Yes, and he paid him, too! He never forced us to run, to do exercise. So he paid him.’

Yesterday I met the cousin from the story and Pradeep reminded him of his opting out of Grandad’s run club. He nodded and laughed. Then we had tea. And biscuits.

Sam and I were given coffee after having our hair washed and ironed at a salon in Hansi. The ratio of coffee to milk to sugar seemed to be as follows 1:4:5.

The coffee is very sweet Pradeep told the son of the salon owner.

‘Thank you,’ he replied.

Pradeep turned to me: ‘See, telling people here their coffee or tea is very sweet is a compliment!’

I’m not sure yet how I will readjust in Australia without the deliciously sweet tea in such copious quantities each day. Cold turkey is going to be tough.

***

‘I’ve not been here very long but already it seems like a task too difficult to go from this village here to Melbourne, Australia.’ Not a question, more of a provocation to create a little context around a thought I’d like to discuss with Sandeep.

I’ve been asking lots of questions of Sandeep and I’m conscious that the questions I’m asking are complex and they take time to answer in his mother tongue, never mind in English. I let my body and mind settle, proof that I have time.

‘More than difficult, Aimee. And for us, too.’

He presses his lips together, holding back the words until he’s gathered all of them, correctly, into crisp expressive phrases with a specificity his profession demands.

‘More than difficult for him. But he had no choice. He did it because he had to. You see, Aimee, when Pradeep went to Australia, boxing in India did not treat him well. When he arrived in Australia, he had to do something to make money. Other people, we would take any job, but Pradeep said to us that boxing is all he knew. For him it was only boxing. He could find other work to get on his feet, he could do labouring for example, but he said no. He would do boxing, just boxing. Pradeep has always been hardworking, very dedicated. And now he has his gym in Melbourne, and boxing is everything still.’

‘He’s single-minded in a way that few people are.’

‘Single minded, yes. Yes. That’s it.

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For Natalie, with love always, Aimée

We had been ushered in from the rain now coming in on its side with the intent to silently trounce those of us who’d been naive enough to see bluish negative space up there in the sky.

We took our replacement seats at the really small table next to the preparation area adjoined to a kitchen in the back, where two men were shifting around each other. One held a sauce bottle unduly high in a lofty scribble above what’s likely to have been a dessert crepe.

I was still shuffling my feet beneath me when Natalie asked: ‘Aimée, what are you going to do with your writing?’ My lovely friend of twenty-eight years asked me this with one spherical tear poised on each of her lower lids, which made my own instantly fill. This was serious talk.

Natalie’s been my friend long enough to have had to read and feedback on the short stories I submitted as a teenager. The first drafts of page upon page of novels started but unfinished. Of pieces entered into competitions. Of the very first rhymes I made that scraped their knuckles across toothy scraps of paper.

‘You’re an amazing writer now. Do you know that?’ It was an actual question. She was looking into my bones, waiting for a response. I was still trying to drink down my emotion so I could open my mouth. A few swallows later, I kind of nodded once – more with my nose than my full head.

The poised tears edged then dived as she continued: ‘I’ve read all of it. I know how much writing you’ve done to get here. The writing you did then – remember that one about the kid who used her bedsheets to take her own life – it was good.’ She gently snorted through her nose before continuing: ‘But your writing now; it’s beautiful’. We both kind of looked, smiled and cried at each other for a second or two. Then laughed.

‘I don’t even know why I’m crying. We’re bloody stoics, the pair of us. We were brought up better than this!’ She slid a napkin from under her cutlery and dabbed her cheeks. ‘I think it’s just because I’m so proud of you.’

‘I’m just crying because you’re crying!’ The truth was that in these minutes whilst the mist collected quietly on the windows facing out into the deep grey of one of many London squares, I felt the axis tip. I had left Australia a bit dazed, a bit frayed, a bit shocked. My feet were fully planted as the waiter asked me what I wanted.

***

One more sleep.

If any of those sleeps are like the ones, I’ve been full-body experiencing this last week, I could move from memoir into dreamscape epic by simply closing my eyes. Remember as you read this that this is a dream I’m describing, so forgive the impracticalities of passing through a flooded plain holding onto only an inflatable ring, passing through a cave like chamber, then plummeting from the top of a tower (not unlike Blackpool Tower now that I inspect the memory more closely as I tap these keys) to its wide thatched base and down, down, down into rapidly shifting ocean.

REM sleep is when perspective, time, place and position is pretzeled – it’s not hindered by the prefrontal lobes that turn off – you’re anywhere and everywhere. Sometimes you’re you and sometimes you’re your grandad.

The common thread of my dreams seems to be: trying to get from point A to point B. Is that the same for you? Rarely does it get more glamorous than that. Yet sometimes. Sometimes there’s a quest.

This dream was probably my most epic quest to date. One Jung would probably have had a field day with: a tower, flood plains, sharks; falling fast into, and smashing through, deep ocean with my eyes wide open; waiting and floating.

Where it all begins, my family are there, the symbol of home.

“I’m off,” I say. I have some form of luggage, something I’m carrying on my back. I don’t know exactly, but it’s heavy because as soon as I set out, I’m climbing and my back is slightly hunched beneath it.

“See you soon,” I shout and wave back to them.

“Watch the road,” this from my dad. He still said this well beyond our teens. Probably he thought we might be so caught up in our own doings we may forget to keep a look out. Watch, not just look. Not just see the vehicles, but watch them and their driver’s behaviour before responding, before crossing. Such basic but comprehensive instruction.

Our parents still worry about us in our most basic quests to get from here to there in real life, so I don’t think this is instructive of my age in this dream. It feels like it’s happening now, though, in my forties.

The landscape is a classic epic landscape – a Swiss Alps-vibe panorama. My family are back down there now, on a sort of hill slash mezzanine floor. I’m starting to climb, my hands are grasping at moist lumps of grassy hillside, my legs are going from crouched to elongated on repeat. I’m making my way up, and it’s getting steeper. I can feel my luggage rhythmically patting the back of my head.

“Shit, what is that?” Something jumps past my gaze – possibly a goat – and my hand slips. “Argh!”

I’m falling, my stomach lurches and I no longer have contact with the ground. As I commit to my fall I grab at my luggage, and despite this feeling now like I’m skiing without the blades, I draw a rubber ring around my waist and I close my eyes. My back ricochets off a jagged ledge, then I tumble further through empty space.

Thwap.

I hit the ground on soft boggy land, and I’m lying there waiting, waiting for the surrounds to pencil themselves in a bit more.

“Can I walk?” I say out loud (well, out loud in my dream). Yes, I can. I start on all fours, as I was before I fell, until I regain confidence in my musculature. Thankfully, my quest isn’t hindered by a broken back or severed limbs. And praise be to me for having conjured a rubber ring that has somehow saved my life in my first of two falls in this epic, from the side of a mountain.

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Gales pick up then. Water releases. Everywhere. People suddenly appear. A jittery clump of moving bodies.

“We’re in for it. You need to get in doors. It’s a bad one.” This person is scooping water out of his walled garden and his family and neighbours are piling sandbags.

“This isn’t my home, though. I need to get back.”

I should say that I don’t know where home is, nor where I need to get back to. Unlike most quests, there is no grand grail I’m seeking, no esoteric knowledge, no clear mission beyond heading in the direction of point B. And again, I don’t know, either literally or metaphorically, where point B in my dream is.

In fact, I start walking down the steadily flooding plain that people are using to flee in their vehicles. I’m wandering – made diagonal by the wind and rain – clasping my inflatable ring and looking every which way to see a path where I might avoid being dragged by the water as it creeps at first then flushes.

I can’t hold onto the road with my feet anymore. I’m lying in the water now. I’m being dragged in the opposite direction. I take off the ring, I hold it out, sit into it instead and try again.

I’m wasting all my energy. I manage to slip onto the last bit of favourable current and rise to my feet on the edges of the flood plain, back where I started. Now though, people are in a frenzy. A friend is packing up her things quickly. “Try treading water like this,” she offers.

I thought that is what I was doing, but somehow this time it works. Cold water rinses my skin. I’m flowing in the direction I need to go. And that’s when I see the cave opening. I know that cave opening. I’ve been here before. I’ve been here long ago.

“No!” I can’t go down this way. That’s where the tower is. The tower is so high. I will shoot through the cavity so fast and plunge the height of the tower so fast that I will snap myself into bits.

The water is frothing now. I’m colliding with the walls of the cave. It’s coming, I can’t dig my hands or kick my feet quickly enough and powerfully enough to change anything. Right before I drop, I feel the sun shut my eyes for me. The falling is of such magnitude as to feel like I too had become long; a greater distance now for the momentum to amplify the thrust of my stomach against my diaphragm and my heart against my throat in swift succession.

Splash!

Down.

Down.

Down, I go.

I hold my breath and watch the bubbly liquid-road leave me from above as my feet and legs continue to pierce through heavy swell.

Still.

I’m looking up to the surface of the water. “Air, keep me going.”

When I finally reach the surface, there are others. Some have surf boards, others boats. I lie quietly in my inflatable ring. I listen only to the clapping and dragging of the waves.

Of course, my inflatable ring is still in one piece. Though much good it did me in preventing me from going far, far, far under. But the AI dream analysis says that the inflatable ring is symbolic of feeling security and protection despite all of the chaos and danger. So, a tool is still a tool in the yank and twist of the dreamscape, it would seem.

There’s a shark. It’s right there. I stay still. There’s another. They’re quite still. They’re resting perhaps. I will float by. Their flesh is flawless; grey and white and shiny.

Chris is there now; he helps me out of the water. “I ended up where the tower was again.” I say excitedly.

“You’ve been there before.”

When I wake, I have to wipe my eyes as if emerging from salt water.

It was all a dream.

(I’ve always wanted to write that.)

**

The waiter sensed we were in the middle of a ‘we need to talk’ kind of something. Perhaps it was the smudge under my eye. Perhaps it was the slowness in our reactions to the quiet clap of his hands upon arrival at my shoulder. Or perhaps it was the bareness in our response; as if he’d spoken another tongue (which he could but he just knew he didn’t); or rather, as if he’d entered our magnetic field with his own facing north too. ‘I’ll return. Okay.’

‘I’m going to try to get published. I’m going to finish this book I’m writing with Pradeep. It’s about how he walked the ‘path of knives’ from a rural village in Northern India to Melbourne Australia where he became a world ranked professional boxer, and what it takes to build a life, identity and a legacy beyond boxing when the world insists you can’t.’

‘Sounds epic. You’ve been working on that for a few years now, haven’t you. How far in are you?’

‘Yeah. About 20,000 words. When I get back to Melbourne, I could submit what we have to publishers with more open submissions policies. There are some publishers that accept partial manuscripts along with chapter outlines and a great pitch, for example. But I think I need to go to India.’

‘That would be brilliant. When could you go, do you think?’

‘I don’t really know. I’d need to go with Pradeep and his family. He and Samantha run a boxing gym in Melbourne, it’s not easy to just go on holiday.’

**

What do I want? I want to go to India. I want to write this book beautifully. And then I want to see what happens next.

Photo credit (Hibiscus image): Amritansh Dubey

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A Trip to Rural India Article 04

On the yawn of a floorboard, light, quick footsteps dabbed above me.

And just like that, a collision of chemicals set fire to my chest, made my quads stiffen, and swiped the shelf my stomach usually lounges on right out from under it.

I sprinted back into the kitchen-dining room – with a hard stop on the boundary upon which I would be witnessed – where everyone was as I left them, including the dogs. All three of them. One chewing, one having chewed and chewed the others’ chews , and one pacing and snippy from having had his chew chewed first by jaws not his own.

My Dad, on the periphery of a conversation happening between Chris, Rob, Maricarmen and Janis, saw the edges of my stop and the emptying of my complexion.

‘Did you just see something?’ He laughed, pointing his chin down like he did when I was a child, disallowing anything but the truth.

‘I heard someone running along the hall upstairs,’ I laughed through my nose, disappointed in myself.

‘Oh my god. I can’t believe you, Aims.’

***

There was a ghost in the village. That’s what the kids said. One said they had seen her at the edge of the sugar cane crops. An old aunty, broken-necked – as if she had dived from the top of the banyan tree and plunged like a penguin into an imagined pool, hands by her sides – and her feet facing away; the force of the ground had knocked them in the other direction.

The first sighting had been in winter and the almost-dark of the late afternoon was enough to send everyone running the long way around, back to their homes after school – the quickest taunting the youngest at the back of the pack.

Each day, the rumours escalated. One child said the woman had died in childbirth and was now looking for a young boy to kill and to offer as a trade for her own soul so she could return to her life in the village. Another child said their mother had said that the aunty would take you if you didn’t go to school. Another whispered that the dead aunty with the broken neck and the feet on back-to-front had grabbed her brother’s leg on his way to the river that morning before the sun had touched everything, and had dragged him to the riverbank, but he’d managed to slither and claw his way through the dirt to escape her. She had no face either, she said he’d said.

‘Maa, they said there’s a ghost on the edge of the sugar cane. She wants to kill a boy so she can come back to life.’

‘Is that so? And how will she kill a boy? If she has no face to see you? If her arms can’t throttle you? And her feet are pointed the wrong way? Ha! Silly boys. Dinner is almost ready. Your father will be here soon.’

***

The morning before I’d heard the unexplainable footsteps, I had been on tea and coffee duty. The corners of the thin windows were misted up. I tightened my dressing gown against the frost taking no notice of the door frames.

Infront of me, I had disks to slot into the coffee machine, two types of milk, and two China cups just off to the side, each with a tea bag submerged in steadily darkening water. I was making grandad his coffee; I’d warmed milk in his cup and positioned it under the spout before pressing the single shot button and waiting for the last creamy drips to make holes in the scant froth.

Maricarmen came in to claim one of the two I’d already lined up on the counter, except her face was ashy and she looked like she was struggling to focus her gaze.

‘Everything OK?’ I asked out of habit; of course I could see she wasn’t okay at all.

‘No. You’re not going to believe this,’ she said drawing a gulp of coffee before committing to anything.

‘What’s happened?’ I asked, concerned. I’ve never seen Maricarmen out of sorts. She’s very similar to my brother and me, we’re almost always part-way through a laugh or preparing for the next.

‘Did you hear the running outside our room just now?’

‘No,’ I couldn’t foresee where the story was going and I treaded lightly.

‘I, erh, I, I,’ Maricarmen touched her earring, ‘I heard the running and thought, oh the dogs must be awake, but I just saw your Grandad, he let them out, they’ve been outside. But, erh. The running woke me up. And I was lying there. And then, I felt something on top of me, pressing my legs here,’ she flattened both palms against her thighs, ‘and then pushing here on my chest. I couldn’t move.’

‘What?’ My question was a clarifying one. Possibly more of a demanding one, even. A shorthand for: please continue, give me some information that can rationalise this list of verbs for me.

‘I know. It sounds crazy. I don’t believe in it. It was so scary. I cannot believe it.’

‘Are you serious.’ Again, a verbal ejaculation. Everything about her demeanour was incongruently serious.

‘Yeah,’ she shook her head slowly, ‘yeah I am.’

‘Where’s Rob?’

‘He’s still in bed.’

‘Was he there when this happened?’

‘Yeah – asleep next to me.’

‘Oh my god.’

We talked about it all day. It: the ghost. The ghost that ran into Rob and Maricarmen’s room and pinned Maricarmen to the bed.

‘Have you read the history of the house?’ Janis asked me. I shook my head. ‘It’s in that file over there. The house was built in the seventeen hundreds by a landowner for his mistress and their illegitimate child. I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight now. And there’s a rocking chair in my room. If I wake up to find it rocking, I’ll be running into yours and Chris’ room.’

Before I went to bed that night, only a few hours after I too had heard footsteps, I stood in the bathroom – the bathroom between our room and my Dad’s – brushing my teeth. The door handle on the door from my dad’s room turned.

‘I’m in here, Dad. I won’t be a minute.’

He didn’t respond.

I found myself focusing on my socked feet and the spread of my toes. Through my heels, I dropped my weight. Using the mirror, I surveyed the shower cubicle, the light fixture in the ceiling – all the accessories they stop still on in horror movies.

A slight whistle escaped from the faucet when I twisted the water on to cool my hands down. I splashed a little on my face. The door handle rattled again. I swiped open the lock and the door, ‘Chris, you little bugger, I know it’s you!’ Then, I heard him run out of my dad’s room and into our room. He was laughing as I pulled back the quilt overs and stretched first my left and then my right under the covers.

Propped up against the pillows, I looked from the page of my book to the cupboard door next to the bathroom. When I had gently pulled the door’s porcelain knob when we’d arrived, I’d half expected it to be a secret passage to a secret room or to a secret staircase to an attic full of secret things. It was just a cupboard. In it, there was a dustpan and brush and two small shelves, on which not even a moth carcass or a spider crumpled up like an arthritic fist.

Chris gave me a kiss goodnight and turned away from the warm orange lamplight. With my book open, I tried to pick up the words as I’d left them last night, and when I couldn’t make sense of them, I went back to the previous page to retrace my steps. The difficulty increased as I attempted to re-read a sentence which refused to reveal its meaning to me. The receptors to these simple words seemed to have been hijacked by all the thoughts I’d collected throughout the day.

Though the cold wind whipped about the gables, our bedroom inflated around the quietly clinking radiators – still hot, though off. I moved one of my legs on top of the covers, as is my habit when I find I’m too warm, but quickly drew it back in. I’d seen a documentary-style poltergeist movie once where the woman got dragged out of her room by her ankle.

Reluctantly I switched off the lamp. I’d progressed through only two pages of text. The lack of light did not deter me from looking, looking determinedly, into the dark.

Despite minutes then hours becoming bulkier, I couldn’t use the extra matter to convince myself it was safe to put my leg out of the covers, or to close my eyes. I’d become bulky in my mind too, imbecilic without doubt.

Flashes of incisiveness told me Maricarmen must have just experienced that phenomenon where sleep paralysis bleeds into wakefulness. She’d woken from one of those hyper-realistic dreams where she’d heard the footsteps so vividly.

But I heard the footsteps as well. I heard running. That was just after dinner. I was fully conscious. Not a drop of alcohol.

‘Arrrrghhhhhh!’ I turned and she was there. I saw her. A child. A little girl. She was there next to Chris. She was about five. She had blonde curly hair. She was neither happy nor sad. She was just waiting for me, like I’d called to her.

Fear rose out of my sweaty limbs with a violence I could not control. I gripped Chris in a tight bearhug and I roared.

Needless to say Chris was gasping, throwing his head one way and the next: ‘Jesus Chris, Aim! What happened!’ He steadied himself. Lay back with his eyes open – took long breaths in, held his heart back firmly in place.

Imagine it for me now.

You’re sunken into the bedclothes so cosily, so cut off from everything external to your body. This state of comfort, this could be what being in heaven is like. Or what being in the bliss of the womb. Vulnerable yet protected. Though you’re not aware of it, your breath is ebbing so heavily as to extract any form of dis-ease from every branch of you and flowing so fruitfully that your body and mind feel complete nourishment.

Then imagine someone bear-hugging you so aggressively, and alerting you so violently in your ears that you plunge into reality as if you were flushed out of heaven – or the womb – on a tidal wave that thrusts you vertically, head-first into the ground. As my mother would say, you don’t know if you’re on your head or your arse.

Terrifying.

I was scared in a way I have never been before. In a way that boiled my blood, seared my skin, and evacuated verity in my voice – only a roar reared out. Chris. Well, I had scared the living daylights out of him for my troubles.

More than that, I was so silenced by my fear, I didn’t tell him who I’d seen.

Shakespeare’s plays aren’t realistic plots knotted on a singular length of reportage, they’re displays of human truths though artistic beauty; they are quite literally poetry in motion. Hamlet converses with his dead father. His dad tells him that his death was no accident, that his uncle, his father’s brother Claudius, had poisoned him. The ghost appears to tell him something vital, in the moments of his despair when he’s questioning deeply the fundamental assumptions he’s made so far in his life – that his mother was a perfect being, now lesser in his estimations based on her marrying his uncle a mere month after his father’s death. His father’s ghost tosses revenge upon him.

So why had I conjured a ghost?

Why had I conjured the ghost of a small, beautiful child? A child that terrified me so wholly, I turned away from her instantly and forced myself violently into the body of my one and only.

I’ll let you hazard a guess. Hopefully it’s more complicated and nuanced than it seems. But it’s probably not Shakespearean.

ABSTRACT PHOTO CREDIT: RYAN ZECK

The landscape juts out snidely, I’d say. The rock and its shards point out at you even from the bottom where the brush bunches, as if in provocation. I’m the king around here. You must go around me.

Around its skirts, there are people tasked. With and without the flash of basic implements, and with and without notice, the cast of shadows alters from one daybreak to another. Where the light previously hitched itself up over a clump of boulders, there’s a bald patch as if shaved, cut open, dugout, closed again, and stitched; but rather chiselled, twisted, roped, pulled, leveraged, shimmied, yanked, and transplanted to the flattened dirt of the village proper in piles to be laid at the base of a new structure.

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On my way to the state library I opened my phone and tapped the YouTube app button. I wanted to remind myself of these scenes from the documentary I’d watched, prompted by Pradeep, about a man from a rural village in Bihor, who carved through a mountain by hand, armed with a hammer and chisel.

Instead, another video started to play, from Casey Neistat, an episode of his vlog entitled ‘Do it Anyway’. Watch it here

I adjust my phone to full screen and landscape and nudge my shoulder up against the cool of the tram’s window. I don’t correct the mistake; Casey’s high impact vlog style clasps my attention instantaneously. Amongst many of his production techniques, I love the sound of the felt pen as he signposts the theme on scraps of crisp paper; its scratchy breath as he orients it in the frame.

Back when our big world adventure was merely the zygote of an idea, (back in early 2017) Chris and I lay, legs tangled on the couch, and watched Casey and his young son’s trip to Vietnam (‘The Vietnam notebook’)

It appeared we’d shared the exact same saturation of sleepiness when we had lay down – after a brief but necessary cool shower in Hanoi – as the one Casey records of his son’s, Owen. Buried deep in the bedclothes, eyes cemented closed, mouth parted. It had been lovely then, on that lazy Sunday in Melbourne, to be transported together by this video to our original backpacking adventure together of 2008; reliving the moped-led mayhem of the cities to the dewy jade-coloured limestone karsts.

Some of Casey’s videographed chapters capture well some of the specific changes or progress I’ve been looking for, for myself, at very specific moments in time. Sisyphus and the Impossible Dream seemed to pop up for me the year before last as I was preparing to have my first amateur boxing match. That one is about his goal of completing the New York marathon in 3 hours and provided many minutes of inspiration, as well as a clear directive that any worthy endeavour is iterative.

This one, Do it Anyway, seemed to be related to this same goal: completing the New York marathon. After setting up the theme of excuses and the things we tell ourselves to cop-out of something we find hard, he quickly introduces Logan. Logan has cerebral palsy.

The description of the condition is simple – there’s poor connection between the brain and the muscles. A critical confluence for the success over 42.195 kilometres. The doctors told Logan and his family he’d never make it out of a wheelchair. The thread of photos and footage progress – clips of Logan as a small child, in baseball uniform, driving his walking frame across the home plate.

Logan’s mum describes him asking her as a four-year-old, when he could ski with her and the family. She answered: when he didn’t need a frame anymore. Footage floods the screen then of powdery snow spraying out from beneath the blades of skis edged by a highly competent skier. And then the chaos of a celebration captured as a still of Logan with a trophy surrounded by his ski team.

My cousin has cerebral palsy. Since she was a child, she’s had operations to straighten her feet, Botox or similar to relax her muscles, on repeat. Our grandad taught her to walk – later than the rest of us, but not much – with a pretty pink pram that he weighted with bricks from the ginnel. Cerebral palsy hasn’t stopped her from being the best single mum to her three beautiful children. She navigates her house with all its obstacles day in and day out. Tears make both scenes fuzzy. Without looking at my fellow passengers, I straighten up and quickly scratch away the moisture from the corner of each eye with my index fingers.

Logan’s New York marathon of 2025 is brutal. Casey shows him collapse, his back compressed in agony, his coach supporting his legs and back as he’s stretched out on the tarmac. He gets up and goes again. He stops again. He goes again. His heart rate pushes beyond upper boundaries. His mother questions whether they should get him to the hospital. You can see the agony pulling on his mouth, his eyes, his neck. His teeth are clenched. He’s fighting so hard against himself. You should watch it if you can, Logan is a seriously impressive athlete and person.

Pradeep told me at training this morning that he spoke with a woman recently who’s from a neighbouring town to his. She used to travel to work four hours there, four hours back, 10 hours work. 2 hours regathering order in the chaos of the home, leaving four hours for sleep. He’d also told me that in India, there’s so much competition for jobs that someone he knows went away with his wife to a wedding at the weekend and when he got back on Monday, they told him to go home, that someone else was doing his job.

I told myself I felt tired yesterday. I’m ashamed.

There was a guy at the gym a while back, well before he was a pilot passing through, I think. It was a Monday morning 6am group class and we were doing boxing strength and conditioning, before boxing technique class. The lights looked more sharply fluorescent in the darkness of the morning. The last round on the battle ropes saw me buckle at the knees slightly as the bell went to stop, and I had to hold on to the cage for a second or two.

The transient man took in the soaked red of my face, and the puddle I’d made (sweat!) and laughed. I don’t think there was malice there, but he said, ‘if you think that’s hard, you should see how hard they train on the mountains of Uzbekistan’.

‘Hmpft,’ I nodded, acknowledging that of course conditions could be harder.

‘Man, if you’re pushing yourself to your limits, it doesn’t matter where you’re doing it,’ Pradeep jumped in.

When I started on the journey of learning about India, through a dip into some of its history and literature, I talked with Pradeep about a memoir I’d just read, titled: The Twice Born by Aetish Taseer. It was the first time I’d come across the word: Bharat. I’d not known that India was the name ‘shaped by outsiders’, where Bharat was the continuation of the ancient. Taseer, brought up in the cultural elite of New Delhi, whose mother was a Indian journalist and father a Pakistani politician, pushes and pulls at a rope the ends of which are his idea of modern India and its push towards reason, logic, and innovation, against the pull of the ancient, the mythological and ‘the brutalities of the caste system.’

‘Aimee, if you want to understand where I’m from and a bit more about my experience, watch Mountain Man. That man is inspiring to me. He was a man from a small village whose wife died after falling on a mountain and being 70km from medical help. He spent over twenty years of his life, day after day, breaking a mountain with just a hammer and chisel. He would not give in.’

Dashrath Manjhi was a farm worker and a general labourer. The death of his wife devastated him, and he felt that her death was avoidable. He wanted to make sure that the people of his village didn’t have to experience what he had – he wanted to make sure they had access to the hospital. Every day he shifted rocks from the mountain to build the foundations of houses in the village. He did it alone. The people around him thought he’d lost his mind, which he said only motivated him more.

Every day. Twenty-two years. Rock by rock.

Single minded determination of this degree is something to truly behold. I can see the parallels in Pradeep’s doggedness for us to narrow in on as we continue to draft the narrative.

Textured image credit: Logan Voss

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Pradeep is just raising the shutter of his garage when I arrive. A mist is rising from my car bonnet as I park beside the yard gate.

‘Morning coach.’ I can see the journey of my warm breath on its cold path.

‘Morning champ.’ We both shift on our feet to get some heat moving.

It’s not long before my feet are tapping out code on the speed ladder. Coach demonstrates twice the pattern he wants me to replicate. I start and stop. My brain goes faster than my feet, then I go back and start again.

‘Yeah, that’s it. You got it.’

Today we focus on speed and technique, and we spend the last fifteen minutes seeing how much I can apply in gloves training.

‘You OK? You seem a bit tired. It’s not like you. Did you sleep OK? I know it’s early.’

‘Really? I feel ok.’ I think about how I slept. ‘The last few nights I’ve been using mouth tape, and I’m just getting used to it. The first night, I put it on and then had to take it straight back off after only a few seconds because as soon as I lay down, my nose was blocked and I felt like I couldn’t breathe.’ I’m unravelling my wraps from my knuckles and wrists as I speak.

‘Really?’ Coach asks as he holds one end of the wrap on my other hand and I circle my wrist. My arms and hands look like just-drenched gaseous and spitting sauna rocks.

‘I’m going to sound like a lunatic, but I had to peel off the tape and have a word with myself! I said: “‘It’s OK, Aim, I won’t let you suffocate, if you start struggling, just take it off and try again tomorrow.” Then after I got comfy, I did some box breathing, just in fours, to slow everything down, and then I put it back on. It was a bit less sticky!’

‘OK. You’ve been trying to nose breathe when you’re training too, haven’t you. You told me that. Are you finding it useful?’

‘Yeah, I’m still trying. I’m finding it hard. Honestly, it’s like learning a new skill. I’ve always breathed through my mouth. I’m a little late on the uptake! Now, when I’m training, I try to breathe through my nose for as long as I can. I can’t last very long, especially when we get to sprinting and high intensity on the bag and pads, but I’m just trying to be conscious of it.’

‘When you’re training Aimee, you’ve just got to breathe however you need to get the oxygen in!’

‘Haha yeah, if you see me passed out on the floor, I might have been trying too hard to get air in through my nose and I couldn’t make it work!’

‘Ha! I know you’ll figure it out. It’s good that you’re trying. It just might take time.’

I have read books that say that breath, or ‘prana’ (defined in One Simple Thing by Eddie Stern) is ‘that which comes before breath’…the impulse towards life’. I have also sat cross-legged, elevated on a jutted-out rock over the ocean, in a pavilion built to mirror an ashram, praying with or to breath they might have said, trying to move that which I breathe in down deep inside my body, though honestly it took many tries to really get my belly to inflate. I’ve laid on my back under a blanket, synchronised with lines of others following their breath as it passes through the nostrils, nose, throat, chest, sides and back of the chest, abdomen and lower back and as it turns around and makes its way back out.

Now I think about it, I’ve done all sorts of breathing exercises. ‘We’re going to get rid of old energy: ‘In for five and out for six through your nose,’ then, ‘with finger and thumb of one hand like a pistol, close one nostril, and breathe in through the other, then out, then close that nostril and breathe in 2,3,4,5,6, and out 2,3,4,5,6…’

I did myself a favour in some of the most stressful months of work some years ago, by laying myself out my living room floor each day before the sun started to creep in under the blinds, in my dressing gown and listened to Wim Hof guide me through intense in and out breathing, then breath holds, and deep exhalations, where I’d sometimes see cloud-like florals in purple and green from what yogis might locate as the third eye chakra. I’d feel sweet tingling in my fingers, and once even my hands got stuck as claws, perhaps in response to a feast of oxygen they’d not really had much of a scavenge at for a while.

I felt the benefits. But perhaps it’s like rehab exercises you do to fix your injured knee, you do the exercise, you feel strong and you’re pain free, and you stop.

Before this concerted effort to change my breathing, those things had all been the things to be done for stints during a yoga class or an allotted moment that I’d reserved for a breathing exercise.

But I’m a recovering mouth breather. The offspring of a mouth breather, who in turn was the offspring of mouth breathers. Generations of us lot, operating in our stress system (the sympathetic nervous system, they call it). It would need to become unconscious.

A few weeks after I told coach about my mouth tape experiment, he asked me how I was going with it and told me he’d got some, too.

‘Aimee, you wouldn’t believe how much it’s helped with my eyes. And my headaches are pretty much gone.’

‘That’s awesome. Just from the mouth tape at night?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Brill! I’m finding that I’m keeping it on all night now – I’ve not clawed at it in the night. I feel like I’m dreaming more. Have you found that?’

‘Really? No. I don’t dream. But my eyes are improving – I’m still seeing double but the images in front of me, they’re not flicking up and down as much and the pain in my neck and headaches are not constant.’

‘Wow. You meditate a lot don’t you. But breathing through your nose is helping more, is it?’

‘Yeah, I meditate for hours. In my village, at four am, I would run past my grandfather meditating or in some sort of yoga pose down by the sugar cane. He’d still be there, meditating, stretching, breathing when we left for school. I’ve always breathed through my nose, but I’ve broken my nose so many times in boxing and since my last concussion, I’ve found it difficult to breathe through my nose at night. My breathing equipment must be broken.’

Years ago, Chris told me about a book called Breath, by James Nester. We have it on our bookshelf. Seems Chris has always breathed out of his nose. I didn’t realise there was a wrong way to use our breathing apparatus, and I didn’t know that my way was the wrong way. And if people survive mouth breathing their whole lives, a right and wrong way didn’t seem obvious.

Then, when I started boxing and then hearing conversations on podcasts centred around not just the cardiovascular but broader health benefits of nose breathing, I decided I’d just start breathing through my nose, for God’s sake.

Wrong again. Starting from where I did, it’s taken a couple of years and I’m still very much working on it.

‘OK, Aimee. We’re sat down, let’s just only breath through our nose now.’ I’m telling myself in my kindest inside voice.

Nope. Blocked. Need to blow my nose, first. Nose trumpeted, I sit down again. I’ve got my back straight, my lips closed, I realise my teeth are in more of a scrummage than softly laid on top of each other, so I have to get my tongue and jaw more involved in the softening process too.

‘Oo a relaxed jaw, that’s nice.’ Yes, positive reinforcement.

First breath in.

Splutter.

Try again.

Splutter, splutter.

OK, shake shoulders out; they’ve crept up near my ears.

In through my nose again.

Nope. I open my mouth; I need let a cough out of its cage.

‘OK,’ I negotiate with myself, ‘I’ll do a couple of mouth breaths in, then try again.’

Again, again, again.

More patience, more relaxing in my face and chest, but really: everywhere. I get to about ten breaths in and out through my nose. I feel a bit headachy. It’s going to be harder than I thought.

I know from what I’ve learned from other habits I’ve tried to change, or things I’ve learned that I need to give myself time, try not to be impatient, which tends to be my default with myself – and just start stupidly and shamefully small. So focus on it for 10 breaths, then see if I can do it for 10 minutes, then as the time starts elongating, and I’m not having to think about it, then see if I can do it when I’m doing exercise.

Goodness me. What a kerfuffle. ‘This is literally the only thing you should know how to do without thinking about it,’ I berate myself – as is my right (and responsibility).

Months pass and I’d reached a point where sitting and nosing breathing was largely automatic. So it was time to progress. I closed the front gate to the apartment. I started walking. Regular pace. ‘Now, just do what you’ve been doing. In through the nose and out through the nose,’ I coached myself.

In. Shit, I can’t breathe!

Open mouth.

Oh my goodness. I thought this would be so much easier.

‘OK. Slower.’ I slowed my walk down. I shortened my steps to match the squarish paving stones. Like a superstitious child, I avoided stepping on the cracks. ‘Try again. Just walk around the block.’

Then over the next weeks, I was able to go a bit further and a bit further. Then over the weeks after that, a bit faster. After that, on my cycle to work, I’d see if I could go up the inclines just breathing through my nose, too.

A few breaths are followed by a sensation of panic in my body, not really mind. Lightning seems to impale me through the throat and I think, ‘shit, I’m going to suffocate’. Philosophically, I know this not to be true, but it’s how my chest and throat responded at that point of the process, nonetheless.

Pffffft. Hope if you’re a mouth breather reading this, you don’t get demoralised by my slow progress. My observation at this stage, if it helps, is that whilst it’s still a work in progress, there are serious benefits. A lot of which is happening on the inside. But coach’s account is the most profound.

‘Do any of you know any breathing exercises?’ Coach asks us all as we sit together after class. We’re mirroring his seated pose and trying to match his forceful in and out breaths. Sweat has started to pool out beneath my ankles. We sound like overworked oxen. Some of us laugh.

One student talks about alternate nostril breathing and we all do a couple of rounds. Coach does some more breathing out rapidly from your abdomen and chest.

‘You know, breathing exercises can change everything. About six years ago, I was coaching and I ended up getting a bad concussion. There were lots of factors, I’d been doing really long hours, I was coaching and training intensively, I didn’t drink enough water, I hadn’t slept very well. I took a shot to the head and when I woke up the next day, I could see two of everything and the screen of my vision was jumping up and down.’

Coach flicks his hand up and down. He exhales sonorously, sharply.

‘I had severe headaches and neck pain. I went to work as normal for the next few days and it wasn’t until days and days later that I went to see a doctor. They advised brain surgery and wearing glasses. The surgery was high risk, and relatively low likelihood of success. I didn’t want to have a complicated surgery on my brain. I did research on eyes and the muscles and thought about it instead in terms of strengthening the six eye muscles.’

He motions with both hands to head – indicating where the eye muscles connect.

‘I decided I’d meditate and do strengthening eye exercises ever since. It was quite a long time after this that I realised that my breathing equipment in my body was broken. I started doing breathing exercises.’

We forget how to breathe, don’t we. And for me, it wasn’t just breathing exercises that have helped me manage my eyes, it’s breathing out,’ he pauses. ‘I don’t have headaches anymore, I don’t suffer from asthma or hay fever anymore, I don’t have neck pain. It’s changed my life. Remember to breathe out. Exhale.’

As I set out to write this, I drew Breath by James Nestor from the bookshelf with all the blue-covered books. I thought these few sentences were pretty compelling:

‘…the nose is crucial because it clears air, heats it, and moistens it for easier absorption… it can trigger a cavalcade if hormones and chemicals that lower blood pressure and ease digestion… regulates heart rate, opens vessels in our toes, and stores memories…’

Read it, if you can. It’s a great non-fiction book; very well written and easy to read. Seems like it’s a job worth committing too.

On our trip to the village, I’m going to keep my eye out for anyone who’s got any lived insight to share on this – the art of breathing. And perhaps find an organic way to weave this into the memoir itself.

I’ll keep you posted.

Our book, ‘The Indian Warrior: A Memoir’, opens with: ‘Home is where the mangoes grow’.

It’s where Pradeep flourished, where his love of wrestling turned into a single-minded dedication to boxing. It’s where he lost and regained his eyesight, only to struggle with his eyes far worse in adulthood (even now). Where he started on what his father described as ‘the path of knives, each step painful’.

In five weeks, we’ll be going there, to Pradeep’s village named Sisai in Northern India, in the state of Haryana.

‘It’s very different, Aimee. My village. Nobody has been. Almost five hundred years my family has lived there. When the British were in India, we didn’t know it. Life in the village was the same. We governed ourselves.’

When talking with friends about our trip, I say I’m excited and curious, but obviously that’s only the salt and pepper of how I’m feeling about it.

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We’ve been writing this book for a number of years now.

I met Pradeep as a boxing student. My husband, a personal trainer, had been going to Pradeep’s boxing classes. He’d find time between his own sessions to learn from a coach that could really teach, from a place of mastery and of love.

By the time Chris stopped, I had found Muay Thai and was looking for a gym I could settle in. I went to Phuket, Thailand to train as a beginner and when I came back, I went to the MMA gym Chris had recommended because of Pradeep.

It wasn’t long before his teaching of the fundamentals and his emphasis on play laid the bricks of a new infrastructure for my life that I’ve been building on for about five years. Since then, Pradeep, Chris, Sam and I have been to battle together in two tournaments and six fights. There’s nothing quite like the preparation, the build-up, the come up and come down of a competition cycle, especially when there’s a trophy, or a medal, or a belt.

Pradeep and I have spent concentrated hours, shoulders tense and hands clenched reliving some of Pradeep’s experiences that are difficult to understand – as a boxing-civilian, as a girl who grew up where The Old Duke pub was the chief navigational landmark, where sugar spilled from bags, not drawn determinedly – raw from the cane – jaw over jowl.

Pradeep’s from a family of athletes. His father was a champion wrestler. His grandfather became a champion racewalker – he set up family athletics competitions where Pradeep, his brothers and cousins would throw shotput, run, hop, skip and jump.

Pradeep’s nieces and nephew are state and national champions in boxing. I can’t wait to meet them and learn from them how to be a better boxer.

As a young kid, I’d only ever eaten mango from a tin (the ‘tropical mix’ that had cubes of peach, pear and those brined, bleached and sugared cherries), or scooped out of those little plastic fruit pots packed with syrup, or: remember those yoghurt pots with three chunks of apricot, or papaya, or indeed mango? Yeah, those. I don’t think they were organic.

Home is where the boys fall

Where I grew up, mangoes didn’t fall from trees, but a boy did. My cousin’s half-brother. He impaled himself on the school’s cast iron railings; the mango flesh of his thigh skewered through like a medium rare kebab. I wrote this poem about it…

Remember when…

A poem for my cousins

From the Fights & Violins collection

By Aimee Coleman

Remember when…

your brother got impaled

on the fence;

a wrought iron prong,

made itself known

from below, alongside bone,

through the parchment of his thigh?

He sat still, didn’t he?

Like a monkey bred for life in a cage,

he’d fallen out of a tree;

an apple the same shape

as our whole bushel

rolling around the estate.

He perched almost, didn’t he?

Like that’s where he’d intended to be;

but no house finch,

barely a flush to his cheeks;

his self, collected up in the moment;

a signpost,

a living tombstone,

an effigy

staked to a grave.

But alive! Alive, as if...

as if his tissue just opened up around it,

spontaneously

gave way.

In lots of ways,

he’s still there;

his body haunts the same streets

on the estate

we streaked with

the carbon of our tyres and our brakes,

left our tears and the DNA

scraped from our knees

and our cheeks,

the snot fisted from our noses

along with roses

of red to slake

the roads’ demands.

The blotting of the tarmac

hides the violence

and the joy

when we were all together.

Now altogether we’re apart

And yet...

You and him, and all of us

are tattooed across my palms.

Pradeep has led an extraordinary life already. I’m joining him and his wife Samantha, and their twins Oscar and Olivia on their family trip. I can’t wait to meet his family. I can’t wait to see the almost mythical place that seems so unlikely to have created the number thirteen middleweight boxer in the world fighting professionally out of Melbourne, Australia.

It’s different. It’s different from anyplace I’ve been to before. All I can be is open. Open to the possibilities. To the things I’ll learn. To the possibility that both the book and I will return something and someone different than they were before.

Stay tuned, I’d say.

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Photo credit: Jeffrey Eisen

At 03:10, the aubade sang out from my phone – the soft sounds of the sunrise to come – the titters of small birds and the expanding-outwards vibration of a light seen not heard.

The sunrise will come upon us first in a light lemony glow, in a small segment of sky to the right of where we park and plod, still waking, heavy under packs of kit to climb, walk, abseil, plus water and food to ascend and descend in the full stretch and throttle of the day’s sun.

Below the stars and above the deep darkness, what we know to be trees are simplifying themselves for now as a light fuzz on the lip of the mountain.

When, yesterday, we spoke about the challenge ahead for today, the day seemed simply long. And in my mind, simplified further to three simple activities: climbing, hiking, abseiling.

So at 4:08 we left the Airbnb and drove as if along an anaconda’s thick back to its midsection.

‘Did that sign say coffee van?’

‘Yeah, but I don’t know what it said about it – whether it’s open or not. And Ross read on Google that it’s permanently closed, so let’s not get our hopes up.’

As we’ve all learned the hard way, the mere prospect of a potential coffee can push one yonder at a speed and distance far beyond comfort zones, but if that prospect turns out to be a fallacy, the downside of that motivational mirage can quickly and brutally destabilise even the strongest of coffee deprived minds.

‘Would they mention it at all on the sign unless it was open?’

Then, the car detonates with laughter as Serge takes a match to bureaucracy, human fallibility, and an imagined person responsible for the sign update going on leave.

Once parked, we set out on the road before veering into the brush. In the not-quite-silence, I follow the snaps of twigs. The path through the bush isn’t a maintained one. Its markers are ribbons tied sweetly around thin barks, the same colour as the abundant leaves – barely discoverable by head torch. There are a couple of realignments made before we make it to the granite face, as the sun is starting to come up proper.

The mosquitos are still awake and are glugging from our legs and ankles even as we thrust them through the straps of our harnesses, crumple our toes into our climbing shoes, and flake our ropes.

Ross asks me to recall the Italian hitch we spent some time yesterday afternoon practising. Hold the climber-end of the rope in left hand, flick a loop (kind of behind it) to then create another half loop and pinch the loops together, then feed the pinched loop bits through the carabiner. (It’s far too soon to call it a biner, yet.) I’ll be belaying Ross as he lead-climbs up the nine pitches. Chris will be doing the same for Serge using the belay device.

It’s steeper than I imagined. Chris and I are beginners. We’ve climbed outdoors once before. The first time on a grade 12 crag where at times we had to shove body bits into cracks and jimmy ourselves up by feet pressed up against opposite shards of stone.

Some days back, when we’d talked through the plan for today, Serge had showed us a video from the other time he and Ross had completed this climb a few weeks ago – the gradient sort of looked as though the rope was merely precautionary.

Now, chins mirroring the gradient of the rock – knees bent, left hand clasped around the climber end of the rope and right hand tighter than it needed to be on the brake end of the rope (trust the mechanics, Aimee, I instructed myself) – it dawned on me that nine pitches meant stopping only in little pouches the rock offered sparingly.

There were no ledges to walk around on or adjacent trails to step off. So instead, three of us huddled tightly, clipping in and leaning against mesh and buckles, knots and bolt to save legs and arms from tiring out, shimmying around each other to switch from belay to climb.

‘What do I say, again?’

I’m shouting up the wall then: ‘Ross on belay. Climb when ready.’

‘Climbing,’ he replied after a short pause.

Around 200 metres to cover. When we started on the wall only moments ago, the option to opt out was really all but lost. The final pitch wasn’t visible from where I stood.

For those who’ve climbed, this is easy slab climbing. Physically, it doesn’t feel fatiguing but the early shallow breaths, the nervousness of gripping toes on 2mm scars in the rock without anything to wrap your fingers or palms around, as well as the responsibility for my friend’s safety as he starts up the rock without protection, could culminate in drained energy, quickly.

When it’s time to climb, I take full mental advantage of the top rope in the first two pitches, crawling quickly across the rock. Once I start to quiet my mind and build some confidence in my feet, my legs and the equipment, I start to think more about where to best place my feet, how to drive through my legs, and what kinds of lumps and bumps make better routes for traversing.

From above, I watch Chris’ confident movements, the choices he makes as he methodically lifts one foot, hips into the rock, and how the other gracefully follows – with all the mechanics in flow. He’s a spider just shifting up the wall.

Ross and I are clipped in now, looking down the grey rock to the abundant trees below.

‘I could not have sat here like this or even stood on a solid ledge at this elevation 12 months ago. Never mind climbed this thing. Even being roped in as we are, I couldn’t have faced down a mountain like this. The exposure would have felt way too scary,’ I say to Ross as we watch Serge assuredly navigate a clear path for Chris below.

‘Yeah,’ says Ross. ‘Climbing outdoors was so good for me in dealing with heights. Skydiving didn’t help me with it at all. You just gradually get more comfortable through each pitch. When you’re surrounded by nature like this, as long as you’re not plunging to your death, you just get to enjoy the views even more!’

We chuckle.

Please, no one plunge to your death, I silently utter outwards.

I pull off the heels of my climbing shoes to give my Achilles a rest from all the choking.

‘OK, I’m going to reach up to that bit and move around that bit that sticks out,’ I point, ‘then go straight up from there.’

‘Yep, good plan.’

‘Ross, climbing,’ I instruct.

‘Awesome. Enjoy!’ Ross replies.

There’s a lot of moss in this section, I try to put my feet in the spaces in between, but the non-mossy bits look small and straight. No wrinkles or plaques in the rock – I just don’t think there’s enough to grip my toes with, so I decide to just move and hope for the best. My foot slips and my stomach matches.

OK, OK. Come on, Aim. I exhale sharply through my nose.

‘You’re doing well, Aims. Keep going. Shout for more tension if you need.’

‘Ross, more tension. Thanks.’

I open my hips wider and take a lip a bit further than feels stable, and I shift the top half so it’s over the bottom half. I pick up momentum again. Already, my covered neck smarts. I hope we’ll be in amongst the trees by midday.

It takes us four hours to finish the climb. We sit at the trail head gulping water and eating left over pancakes from yesterday’s lunch feast. It’s 10:15. We hear a beep-beep, see a car parked on the mountain road behind us, followed swiftly by a man waving and running towards us.

‘It’s John,’ Ross says to us. ‘John! Hey!’ He shouts back.

‘Do you guys want water?’ John calls from below.

‘That would be amazing! Yes. Thank you.’

Trail magic. I smile. We’ve packed as much water as is feasible for climbing, but the sun is already stalking us with its high beam. We apply zinc on top of sunscreen. When John brings his canister then asks to join us, we get cracking on the two-hour hike to the chalet – and dare I even say it: to the coffee van.

‘Yeah, you’ll get a coffee. He’ll be there,’ John affirms.

‘Are you sure? It said on Google maps that it’s permanently closed.’ I need to see it to believe it.

‘He wouldn’t miss an opportunity at this time of year.’ He’s talking about the man who owns the coffee van. ‘And there was a road sign as I was coming up.’

‘We saw that too. Didn’t know whether it was saying it was open or closed.’

‘If it were closed, they just wouldn’t say anything.’

He’s from around these parts, so I want to take his word as gospel. Yet, I just know I’ll be annoyed if I let the idea in and it comes to zilch. High stakes, indeed.

Through the heat we plunge, past silvered trees whose trunks and branches resemble long decayed fingers bent into themselves. A sound like gentle rainfall on a low tin roof skitters out as we disturb thin stone chips in our tread over quartz- and mica-threaded boulders.

At around 12:30 we edge around the lookout point where the chalet rests. Amongst the sudden clumps of people and the light crunch of their vehicles’ tires over gravel, I’m intent only on the bathroom facilities, so that when the coffee van comes into sight, it’s as if a mirage solidifies.

There’s pep in my step as I head back towards the picnic table the group have struck upon.

I need to stretch, I think to myself. I’m sore and tight from my pelvis to my toes. This coffee is going to taste so good.

‘Is the descent physically tough? Or just long?’ I ask Serge.

‘Nope, no hard downclimbing or anything like that. We’ll just be walking downhill for the most part. There’ll be scrambling and a bit of abseiling,’ he reassures me.

‘Is this the bit that took seven hours for you guys, last time?’

‘Yeah. And we set off from this spot quite late – around 4pm I think. We’ll be setting off once we’ve eaten our sandwiches and coffee, which would make it about 2pm.’

Not only is the coffee van here, the machinery is fully functioning, the coffee and milk are in full supply; but the man making it is not messing about. This is Melbourne-grade coffee, and I sweeten my sips with what’s left of my thick banana and almond meal pancake.

I fantasise for a moment about staying in this spot, coffee in one hand and an endlessly regenerating pancake in the other.

We spend a chunk of time reactivating our calves, quads, hamstrings, adductors, abductors. My hips are distressed. After months of over-exertion and under-care, I do wonder how well I’ll be faring when I finally make it to bed tonight.

Almost as soon as we step onto the trail head to descend, the textured quietness you find only in places largely ignored by people, rises from the floor of the creek. Male cicadas buzz for female attention. Ravens occasionally squark overhead.

Lowering ourselves onto what looks like the set of Jurassic Park, we listen to John’s story passed onto him from an indigenous elder about giants who used to roam the earth, whose millennia-ago mouldered organs form the granite structures we now marvel at.

‘Look, that could be a giant’s lungs there – can you see?’

For many hours, we walk and pause in wonder at the layers of green, grey, and brown. When we come to a waterfall, we bathe. Despite its diminutive scale as far as waterfalls on this mountain go, the deeply sonorous gush prevents us from hearing each other only metres apart.

I take of my cap, scoop it through the water and place it back on my head. John talks about the water’s energy. We look down past the water and into the next layer of forest. We marvel some more.

‘We’re moving quite quickly, I think we might get out of here before 8pm. John’s route finding is great. It’s like the creek is talking to him!’

John finds a piece of wood that looks like a sculpture of a hunting rifle. He takes it on as a worthy appendage, reaches further across the creek’s boulders and grounds his feet deeper to protect it for the rest of the way down.

In the cocoon of ferns, we talk.

‘You knew him?’

‘Yeah, I knew him. We know him and his family.’

‘Do you think he’s still here?’

‘No I don’t, but I don’t know.’

He didn’t believe it happened the way they say it did.

‘It rarely does, does it.’

‘I asked the police questions when they came. We had a good conversation. The policeman shook my hand when he left. We’d built a good rapport. I knew he was just doing his job. There’s a lot he didn’t know.’

He seems to think you should know why it is you’re chasing a man.

The conversation continues in my mind as we carry on carrying on walking. My watch buzzes softly but I don’t check the next milestone of steps we’ve just surpassed. Though it’s late afternoon now, it’s far too soon for any acknowledgement of metres covered.

I think about the parts of the accounts that cleave to and apart from the story that I read when it happened. I observe my own tiredness and disengagement from the news, physically now, in the body parts that are starting to fatigue as I drop down into a squat and extend toes out to meet the next ledge.

Orwell’s mindless proles of ‘1984’ disturb my peace. This passivity I’ve been harbouring pinches me now where my harness does – has me chafing around my middle.

‘How much longer do think we’ve got here, darling?’ I ask, wishing for an impossible answer.

‘I have no idea. I don’t know how we’ve managed to get so far without really abseiling up to now. John’s doing an amazing job of getting us through this bush. Ross and Serge abseiled lots of this section, they didn’t think we’d be able to just get down here on foot.’

We march across a fallen tree. Where possible, we opt for the trajectories that keep our feet dry. The birds are starting to settle until only the kookaburras are out still, laughing at the dusk, and at us, probably. John keeps disappearing into the creek’s luxuriant curtains and coming back with instructions on the right path to take.

By 20:00 my quads have very little juice left. I’m trying to imagine what my muscles and fascia must look like from the inside. It’s hard to take the message my legs seem to be broadcasting on a loop, off air: You’ve not got much left, Aim. Can’t go much longer. Need to get to the car. Surely, we’re nearly there.

I can tell from how Ross and Serge are quietly moving, eyes to the earth just in front of their feet that we’ve farther to go. They’ve not hinted at all at being close.

It is longer. Steps get much shallower, the way gets darker and wetter. Our feet are wet; our legs are wet. I’m wet to my chest after taking a misstep and plunging into a pool (despite an ingenious use of rock bark found, carried, and laid by the boys to divert the torrent and thus reduce the likelihood of getting wet).

‘95 percent wet, Aims? How did that happen?’

‘98 percent!’ I’m soaked to my armpits. Farcical. ‘I thought it was deeper over there. I overcommitted by 98 percent.’

We wind through passive rock pools and active stream – a slow moving slinky. The canopy glitters in layers. The nocturne fizzes from the creek bed.

As my quads tell me to eff off, my bum gets wetter too. I bang my shin against a rock. Less than eleven minutes later, I hit my knee on an unseen bark overrun by fern.

‘Darling, look at me. You’re doing great. Go slow. Now’s not the time to try to get it over with quickly. Why don’t you eat something? This is when we need to stay focused now that’s getting dark. The rocks are slippy. I know you’re knackered. This is hard. This is a story we’ll be talking and laughing about for years.’ He gives me a kiss. I don’t want anything to eat but I chomp through a banana and a few cashew nuts.

It is shocking how long it takes to cover a distance like 2.4 kilometres when descending through a creek. Chris is in front of me offering his leg and then his foot to lower myself down with.

‘Get excited everyone, we’re about a 10-minute walk, a 5-metre climb and an abseil away from the trail path leading out onto the road.’

I honestly thought it was a joke. I didn’t know if I had it in me to climb, not even 5 metres. I was struggling to step now over the small slippery rocks in the creek. I mis step into a hole not visible between nature’s detritus.

I hoped Serge was joking. He wasn’t.

‘This is the last bit Aim, just grab my hand and I’ll pull you up this bit.’

The climb descended into a slide on bums – not an abseil – onto the path.

We’ve made it.

Hallelujah.

We got back to the house at 00:30. I drank a litre of water with electrolytes in and chewed the rest of my sandwich like a hand puppet.

In the shower, I buried my chin into my chest and stood still and silent under the gentle heat. If I could have lowered myself to sit on the floor, I would have. No chance. I washed the thick zinc from my face and hands. I softly massaged my outer thighs with soap. No such luck with hips, quads and knees, which were alight to even the skim of soap across skin.

22.5 hours had passed since we had left our beds.

I didn’t set an alarm for the morning.

If you’re lucky to have friends who not only love this stuff but enjoy sharing what they know and making unusual adventures, you know exactly how much those friends are cherished. And if you’re lucky enough to have a hero of a husband like mine, you’ll know how gratitude acts as duct tape against the thinning of your mind and musculature even when it seems like an extra ten metres isn’t even possible.

What a great way to seal 2025 and set out the gauntlet for 2026.