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Eiffel Tower
Rickenbacker Guitar
Taj Mahal Pop-Up Card
Camero Business Card Sculpture
Rickenbacker Guitar -Papercut Card - Half In, half Out Card
Harley Motorcycle Business Card Sculpture

Here’s something I did for the May 2011 issue of Chirp magazine. It’s obviously the Taj Mahal. It’s interesting how much you learn about something when you have to draw it. A larger version can be seen if you click on the image.

And I’ve included some close-ups, below. Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun…fun.

What can I tell you about? Please sit down, get comfortable, for I have lots – probably too much – to write about. The mad traffic from Delhi airport, full of battered cars, auto-rickshaws, buses, trucks, motorbikes, bikes, most crammed full with people. Breakfast on a sunny balcony with the birds singing different songs from the green branches. Goats filling the road to Jamid Masir, tinselled necks marking them out for the Great Feast of Eid.. Mohammed, the stylish rickshaw driver who cycled us round Old Delhi, mobile phone pressed to his ear. Streets of tiny shops where people sat on carpets, discussing wedding saris and jewellery. Dust from the huge sacks of chillis burning your throat in the spice market. The view from the top, staring down at the gently decaying building, while men sleep on lower roofs and carts of goods are continually blocking the streets below. Then, on to the modern tiled Metro, where we were sped away to the more orderly Connaught Place, a hive of pavement laying and beautifying.

Or what about the mathematical tranquillity of Humayan’s Tomb, where the sun squinted through the jali screens into the cool darkness within? Families out in their weekend best, posing for photographs around the site of the Qtab Minar, where children ran and rolled laughing down the grassy slope. Or the ancient Haus Kaus college site, where students study geometry homework among the shaded arches while down below a less carefully-minded youth sculls in a giant inner tube across the poisonous jade green lake.

Or the sense of people living everywhere, starting with the cloth tents and corrugated iron shacks along almost every roadside? Construction workers – men chatting, women working and children helping – camped in the shadow of the concrete fly-overs. Small children tapped at the car windows on main roads, selling books or calendars, turning cartwheels or more, under the gaze of their teen minders. Cows went wherever they wanted to be, tugging at rubbish, wandering across motorways, gathering in slow companionable groups, taking their own Indian time.

Then there were regular visitw to the vegetable and fruit stalls, each item beautifully on display – or the chai stall nearby, where, one night, great skeins of halva paste were being tugged into smoothness over the foil-wrapped branches of a tree to make a smooth biscuit dough. Or trips to the stationers shop where all things could be found, no matter what it said on the box. The haberdasher who could – in a shop smaller than many living rooms – find an assortment of string, ribbons and craft materials, plus a hundred yellow "Bookaroo" rosettes and two handsome tie-on beards for a visitor to take home for her children’s dressing up box. There were trips to the MESH shop, home of a good charitable trust, where craft goods made by the handicapped are sold. Or, in the block we went to for bread, the tall glass-fronted Benetton store, the sight of a man dangling from a ladder on a rope, wiping the fourth floor windows. More and more and more images come into my mind, and I hope soon to find a place for them on my website. (Twitter? Blog? Impossible. I needed all my head to even take in such sights!)

But, apart from all this, there special reason why I was delighted to be there. I was there for the weekend of BOOKAROO, the most wonderful Delhi CHILDREN’S BOOK FESTIVAL, now in its second year. For two days, children from toddlers to teens milled around the sunny green garden of the Sanskriti museum, meeting writers, artists and storytellers from across India and Asia, as well as visitors from Australia, France and the UK.

JENNY (Violet Parks) VALENTINE and ANDREW (Spy Dog) COPE were there, as well as WENDY COOLING and JO WILLIAMS, collecting a great crowd for their Elmer the Elephant books and activities.

The festival bookstall, run by EUREKA, the specialist Delhi children’s bookshop, supplied books by most of the speakers. Their array of Indian books surprised me, books that we rare

See this picture? It’s the cover for The Third Elephant, beautifully and atmospherically created by artist Helen Craig, and shows a small carved wooden elephant, who lives on a high shelf in a forgotten room with two grumpy older elephants and a wise grey mouse for occasional company.

The one thing he loves, the one thing that gives him joy and hope, is “a miniature marble palace, whiter than the moonlight that flickered around it. Elegant minarets graced each corner, and the beautiful dome was tipped with gold. It was a palace fit for dreams.” You can see that in the picture too.

But, with the house due for demolition, the room is suddenly stripped of everything, even the beloved palace. That night,“he thought about what the mouse had told him: wish for what you want, wish for what you dream about. “I wish,” he thought, as hard as he could, ”I wish I could see the white palace again.” The moonlight flickered around the room like secret laughter.”

Thrown from the window, he goes on to adventures where he helps three young people as much as they help him. Eventually the small third elephant does get his wish, although it isn’t exactly the miniature white palace. It is more than the miniature model. What the Third Elephant eventually sees is the famous building itself.
Hey! Going a bit heavy on the book promotion here, aren’t you, Penny? That’s perhaps what you’re wondering? No, it’s not that. I’m talking about past and present matching up.

You see, long ago, that miniature white palace really did exist. It was kept in my grandmother’s best room, with other objects from India where she’d lived as army child, wife and mother. Little myself, I would creep into that room when Nanna Rose was too busy to notice and tell me off. Then I would stare at the palace and daydream, because the room felt full of untold stories. My quiet grandmother never ever spoke about her life in India. Was that from sadness, loss, grief, regret, relief? I never knew and by the time I should have been bold and asked, both she and the room had gone.

Years later, when that lost white palace re-appeared in a short scribbled exercise, I seized it, although the writing soon became tough going. I had to know enough to ground my story. So for ages I researched fiction and non-fiction, websites, maps, films, videos, interviews and more. I picked up oddments of information and wove them into a vast nest until the words were so many that the whole thing seemed about to topple over. I hid the wretched weighty unreadable mess away.

Time passed, and then I saw a charming brass statue in a shop: Ganesh! He who makes impossible things possible. He who, with his helpful tusk, is god of writing. Ganesh with his kindly elephant head. It seemed a sign.

I had a few strong words with myself, went home, hauled out that unwieldy manuscript and began again at the beginning. I discarded anything that didn’t help the wooden elephant’s story, or that of Sara, Nita or Jack. A year or so later, The Third Elephant was published, and some people and children read it and liked it. One or two loved it.

I loved it too, although my finances and circumstances had been way too tight for any travel or first hand researching. I slightly regretted that I had made my story largely from dreams and illusions.

However, something wonderful is happening. I have a friend. She is living in India for a while. So, just after my next ABBA post, I will be off on my own small adventure, though I will be too excited to write about all this sensibly by then.

You see, even though it is long past the making of the book, just like the Third Elephant, I will be on my way towards the “beautiful white palace”. At long last, I’m getting my wish, and seeing the Taj Mahal for myself.

Wonder what objects have long inspired your dreams?

www.pennydolan.com


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