Flex Mentallo

The Englishman did his best to figure out how to bring the shy girl out of her shell, and little by little she did, and her gleaming smile returned whenever he came. She, of course, was Mridula, the girl with the shining eyes, now 16, and fast approaching a critical stage in her education. And I, of course, was the Englishman.

Sometime before the Englishman came, the mother had contracted cancer, and lay dying in the one room family home even as Mridula and the Englishman read Keats on the verandah. The family could not afford chemo or morphine, so her agonized cries were constant behind the door.

Nirmal told the Englishman that Ashraf’s daughter had as a small girl been one of his brightest pupils, but her confidence had been steadily eroded by her mother. Ashraf's wife had been a teacher, who had had a choice of marrying either Ashraf or his younger brother. In Ashraf she thought she had the better catch, but while the brother flourished, did well in business and built a big house, Ashraf had a string of misfortunes, and always remained poor. Ashraf’s embittered wife wanted her daughter to do better, and so was constantly criticizing her. According to Nirmal, nothing she ever did was good enough. The girl had retreated entirely into her shell, had not the confidence to speak in English, even though she knew some. Nirmal had become seriously concerned for her, and cajoled the somewhat reluctant Englishman to visit her virtually every evening during his three-month stay.

The house he visited most often belonged to Ashraf Ud-Din Ahmed, a farmer with an excellent grasp of English, who desperately wanted his daughter to learn it.

The Englishman was not an especially good teacher. The food and the climate did not suit him, and he became very thin. He was often tired and irritable, frustrated by the children’s lack of even the most basic understanding of English. And he was slow to learn Bengali, which even to this day, he has never mastered, despite frequent visits to the village down the years and decades after.

He was only in the village of Bonhooghly for a few days. On his return to England, he determined that he must go back there somehow, and that decision changed his life. An artist, he became more interested in the application of arts practice to community engagement, and less enamoured by a 'brilliant' career as an artist (an aspiration his meagre talent was in any case insufficient to support). In 1985 he returned to the village for three months, lived and worked there, ran art classes at Paddyfield School (not really a school), and at Nirmal’s insistence, spent his evenings visiting villagers’ homes to teach them English, which he said was desperately needed.

He especially remembered Mridula, the shy girl with the shining eyes and gleaming smile, enraptured by every word, saying nothing at all.

Her brother, Daktu still recounts the earnest discussion about English sentence structure – ‘the chicken in the kitchen', not 'the kitchen in the chicken.’ The Englishman discovered, among other things, that Bengalis do not know how to wink. Either both eyes are open or closed at once.

I remember the Englishman describing to the children who clustered round him many wonders to be had in the western world – fitted kitchens, tables and chairs, cutlery, flush toilets, televisions and so on.

The Englishman first met Mridula in 1982, when she was only 13. She and her brother had come one evening to Paddyfield School on learning that their teacher, Nirmal Sen Gupta, had brought an Englishman to visit.

CLOUDLETS BRIGHT CAREER “I am sitting on the verandah of Mridula’s family home. Mridula and I are studying John Keats poem, “To one who has been long in city pent” “As darkness falls, just-hatched winged termites swarm the naked light bulb above our heads. Attracted to my white clothes, the termites are soon swarming over me as well. Exhausted insects tumble to ground beyond the small circle of light, where hungry chickens and fat bullfrogs pounce, oblivious to the watching humans. Two bats flit between the dark trees and the balcony, virtually stopping in mid-air to snatch the hapless insects. Completely unconcerned by our presence, they dive and swoop overhead, sometimes brushing my hair with a feather’s touch in their eagerness to feed. The bullfrogs, meanwhile, have mopped up so many of the exhausted termites they can scarcely move, only waddling awkwardly away when an emaciated dog sneaks in to feast on the survivors. As Mridula reads in halting English, 'Tis very sweet to look into the fair And open face of heaven, - to breathe a prayer Full in the smile of the blue firmament.” Journal entry 20th November 1985

WOW! That's a find I'll never forget, too. I like to think that there are more boxes like that out there somewhere. Thanks for keeping me inspired for the hunt! If I remember correctly, I ended up with that Cinderella Love 29... ...and still have it: It's a beauty! Best copy I've seen by a country mile. It's always when I look at this cover that I'm most conscious of his tendency to depict older men and - arguably - women. I wonder if this was a conscious choice and if so his motivation? I cant being myself to believe that a draftsman so skilled would not be able to depict teenagers if he so chose. So were these aimed at an older demographic? Or were they pitched at younger folk who might aspire to the romanticized lifestyle in maturity? Apologies if this has been done to death!

I've been in Calcutta for the past couple of weeks. I hope it was pleasurable. Sadly, no. Will post in Serendip.

Let me know when you get bored with her - I mean 'it'. Flex sighting! I've been in Calcutta for the past couple of weeks.

Well there's no way you'll fit in here! As the actress said to the bishop.

Let me know when you get bored with her - I mean 'it'.

My guess is...alanna. A harmless drudge.

Yeah, that one's purty.

A poor attempt to disguise an obvious conspiracy. Did you two cook up this little story while sunbathing on the beach?

Beautiful. We don't have Edgar Church. But we have you.

Tales from the Island of Serendip updated thread navigation Serendipity Serendipity - Paddyfield School - The Story of Mohan - Sometimes Sting School bully! El Puente Muralist Joe Matunis - El Puente de Williamsburg - Return to Paddyfield School - Lucina Bells From the Deep Werner Herzog - Juliane Koepcke - The lost city of Kitezh - Sadko - St Clemente DavidMerryweather Virgil Finlay - Reed Crandall - Graham Ingles - Berni Wrightson - Al Williamson Small Works Flex studies for larger paintings pcalhoun & jimjum Clark Ashton Smith - Pat's poems - Jimbo's excellent paintings Father Hess The Life of Father Hess - Kasauli Art Camp - The Death of Mohan Ghosh - Rabindranath Tagore - DavidMerryweather art collection Black Marigolds In Search of Lost Time - Georges Seurat - Roger Fry - The Trojan Horse - Ananda Coomaraswamy - The Great Stupa at Sanchi - Ajanta caves - Black Marigolds Detective Stories Johannes Vermeer 1632–1675: A Detective Story - camera obscura - Han Van Meegeren - The Theft of the Mona Lisa - Donato's Captain America and other works - Rainer Maria Rilke - Cornell Woolrich - Cat's space themed paintings - Netsuke - Hart Crane - Cat's 'Creation' - Boba's illustrations - Caravaggio's Nativity Velasquez Las Meninas - John Singer Sargent - Flex large painting - Thomas Nashe - Tom O' Bedlam - Georges de La Tour - Flex exhibition - Joseph Wright of Derby - John Martin The Bosnian Conflict Andrei Tarkovsky - Welcome to Sarajevo - Margaret Moth - Yasna's cat - Romeo and Juliet in Sarajevo - Miss Sarajevo - the Serious Road Trip - War Child - the Help album - The Ruin pcalhoun Writer and Book Collector Autobiographical notes - Jade tiki - Ubbo-Sathla by Clark Ashton Smith - Robert Q Sale - Tekkai Sennin - Bakemono - Zuni fetish - Yooshi's ghosts - Kuniyoshi Steven Assael Paintings - drawings Photos of Nirmal's village When Shabana was 11 - Mohammed Yunus - Grameen bank - mosaics of Ravenna, Venice & Florence - Duccio's Maesta - when Tuku was a child - We cry to Thee, O Conqueror of love Steven Assael Bride paintings with details - Spirits of the dead keep watch Calcutta Flex photo essay - Lucina's gold medal The Hero's Journey The Courts of Chaos - 'The Heroes' by Charles Kingsley - Medusa - Archetypes - Chris Vogler - Galaxy Quest - the Trickster - Prometheus In the Beginning Altamira - Shanidar - flower burial Interlude Mir para - Lija and her baby - Lullaby - Her name is Zoa Emergent themes My relationship with Bonhooghly Before They Pass Threnody - Jimmy Nelson - The Lost Steps - Witness - Jean Baptiste Debret - Johann Moritz Rugendas - Sebastião Salgado - Serra Pelada Sting & The Rainforest Foundation Sting in the tail - Raoni’s message - Rolling Stone - World in Action - 30 Most Generous Celebrities list The Last Free People Before they pass away - Yanomami - Christina Haverkamp - The Haximu Massacre - pcalhoun on rip-off charities - Love Story - Darkness in El Dorado - Kenneth Good & Yarima - The Good Project - Mridula & I Lost Cities Bitter fruit - El Dorado - The Lost City of Z - Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett - Garden Cities of the Xingu - Caral Interlude I want she don't go back to that hell Heaven's River Nazca - Maria Reiche “the lady of the desert” - Secrets of the Inca - Wari tomb - the end of all things - Machu Picchu - the Sacred Valley - The condor at Pisac - Ollantaytambo - the "eye of the llama" - The Viracochan image - the pyramid of dawn - Momia Juanita Alternative Histories Jericho - Çatalhöyük - The Great Mother - Tierra del Fuego - Lilith Flood Cataclysm - Epic of Gilgamesh - Genesis - mythological diffusion - "Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan" by John L. Stephens The Universality of Myth Hamlet's Mill - the Sampo - the Phoenicians - the Paraiba Stone - Fusang - Rowan Gavin Paton Menzies - Zheng He - The Bosnian Pyramids - Maya - Xibalba Sunk Atlantis - Guanahacabibes - Mysterious grid - Bimini Road - Yonaguni - Mu - James Churchward - Out of the Aeons - Lemuria - Kumari Kandam - Ice Age Civilization - Graham Hancock - Lost Continents - Zealandia The Human Condition E. J. Michael Witzel - Laurasian mythology - humanity's emergence Arnold Bocklin The Isle of the Dead - What Dreams May Come Was God an Astronaut? Eric Von Daniken - Chariots of the Gods - The Morning of the Magicians - At the Mountains of Madness - Carl Sagan Steven Assael Druso U.F.O Kenneth Arnold - flying saucers - Roswell Incident - Maury Island - "men in black" - Project Sign - Project Blue Book - "foo-fighters" Dark Matter Alien abduction - the size of the universe - Multiple universes - Stephen Hawking - Fermi's paradox - the Drake equation - The Silence - N-rays - innate releasing mechanism - Carl Jung - The Roper Report - The abduction - The Dark Side of the Moon - gamma-ray bursts - Ordovician extinction - Invader - Budd Hopkins - the abduction of Linda Cortile - John Mack - Aliens in America The Search My red book - Carl Jung's Red Book - Charles Steffen - Ernst Haeckel - Jeffrey J. Kripal Lost Horizons The Snow Leopard - Lost Horizon - Shambala - Hollow Earth - the Thule Society - The Way of the White Clouds - António Andrade - Tsaparang - Mount Kailash - Bhagavad Gita - The Upanishads - Navratri Interlude Update from Lucina Festival Durga Puja - Ramlila - the hijras - City of Light Interlude Further update from Lucina - Calcutta Botanical Gardens - Indian ComicCon Pilgrimage Puri beach - Juggernaut - Temple of the Sun - Kajuraho - Reprise Interlude pcalhoun 'Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus' - Lucina's Conference - Market Day Photographing Wildlife More Photo of Village Life - Ongoing Correspondence - Ganges 'Beauty Spot' -Eid A Christmas Carol The sheer exuberance of Bengali village life in a hundred photographs Labyrinths Pan's Labyrinth - Symbolic Pilgrimages - Chartres - The Mystic Rose - A Pilgrim's Progress - The Labyrinth of Buda Castle Goddess of the Labyrinth King Minos - 'Da-pu-ri-to-jo Po-ti-ni-ja' - the first European civilization - the palace at Knossos - bull dance Atlantis Thera - Tsunami - Akrotiri Theseus and the Minotaur Mycenaean ascendancy - Pasiphaë - the Minotaur - Theseus and Ariadne - the integration of the shadow - Betrayal - Right of Passage The Holy Grail The Da Vinci Code - the Ark of the Covenant - Knights Templar - the grail in literature and television - Perceval, le Conte du Graal - Joseph of Arimathea - King Arthur - the grail in movies - Excalibur The Albigensian Crusade Imitatio Christi - Heresy - King of the World - Crusade - "God will know His own" - Simon de Montfort - The Inquisition - "Not a bird sang for a generation" - the Wasteland Parsifal Sin, redemption, pain, and healing - Bayreuth - Hans-Jürgen Syberberg - Healing the Wound - Wings

In the holy book are the following words: “We worship those people who have struggled, or do struggle, or will struggle, for the good.” Farvadin Yasht We all have wings. Guardian Angel

And this concept of good and evil as opposing forces in the world stretches back at least 8000 years. Zoroastrianism was the first world religion to conceive it. Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity built their foundations on the teachings of Zoroaster. The concept of guardian angels, or fravashi also derives from Zoroaster. Fravashi literally means "spirit of the road".

Through his wanderings, full of remorse, he faced many trials, eventually gaining wisdom through suffering. From wisdom, humility. From humility, vast compassion, sufficient to heal the wasteland, sufficient to become a worthy guardian of the grail. He did not so much guard it, as become it.

Parsifal was a fool who sought redemption because he thoughtlessly slew a swan in the forest.