Indian Summer

Indian Summer

Little boy, I watch you play, with the sun kissing your hair and
laughter in your eyes. Every now and then I see you look for me,
reassured that I am close by. I am never far away.

In the yard, you are chasing hens, your chubby little arms
outstretched. As a little girl, I too, used to play here but my
grandmother would be tutting now and tapping on the window, calling for
me to stop tormenting the chickens - they don't lay so well when
they've had a fright.

But I will never tap the window or tut at you. I want you to be a free
spirit - like your father.

You remind me so much of your father already. He's far away. But even
brief love can bring a lifetime of happiness. I only have to look at
you to see that.

You will like your father when, one day, you meet him.

When he arrived here on the farm that day in June and smiled with his
eyes, I felt that I already knew him. Our eyes met, and fused, as
though we shared a secret. My father liked him immediately because of
his honest, open face and he was a good, strong worker.

When his day's work was done, and occasionally even when it wasn't, we
would escape to the top field together and sit in comfortable silence,
staring idly out across the valley where the patchwork fields met the
skyline. Most days a tractor's engine would be humming somewhere far
away, and we could smell diesel on the breeze as the driver manoeuvred
it through a gap in the hedge and out of sight.

Below us, we could just make out the roof of the whitewashed farmhouse
through the trees. Sometimes, I would see my grandmother, tiny in the
distance, searching the yard - for me, no doubt, and we would laugh
together for outwitting her. She never found us.

One day, I turned to watch your father only to find him watching me and
he pulled me gently down into the long grass with him. He told me then
that he loved me.

He smelt of the land that he worked on, of fresh air and hay and of the
animals he tended to and sweat. It was a sweet smell.

"I'm only here for the summer," he said, as if in warning. He followed
the sun. When summer was done in this country he would follow it to
another. He called himself a "free spirit" and had travelled to places
I could only dream of. When the summer was finished here, and my father
had paid him in full, I knew he would be gone again.

Far too soon came the end of summer and he was leaving.

"I'll surprise you one day" he had said by way of goodbye, leaving an
Indian Summer behind him.

He never knew about you. He had gone long before even I knew about you,
but I don't think it would have made any difference.

As Christmas approached with no sign of snow and my grandmother
questioned me angrily about my changing body, there dropped a postcard
from him on the mat. The picture showed a temple, which I hardly looked
at, and on the reverse his handwriting scrawled lazily across the card
like a spider's legs. I devoured his words and closed my eyes trying to
imagine the smells and sounds that he was experiencing. I sniffed the
card but it smelt of nothing. I badly wanted to smell the incense,
hashish and thick, polluted air of the city. If I listened long enough,
I could hear the sea lapping the sand in the evening and in the
distance the noise of the crowded streets and the sound of motorbikes
honking each other, the drivers shouting at pedestrians to get out of
the way. I could picture him clearly in Goa, sharing a beach hut with
the friends he had met up with, buying hashish from a peddler on the
beach. He had arrived there just at the end of the Monsoon season, he
wrote, and the area was luscious, green.

"Far greener than your Welsh valley", he joked.

I have kept the post-card, of course. I put it in a shoe-box under my
bed and later, when I realised I was pregnant with you, I placed your
little scan photograph in there. I have kept other things too - the
identity bracelet the Midwife tagged you with just after you were born,
a lock of your hair rescued from your first hair-cut, your first pair
of shoes. When your father comes, I will show him everything.

I wonder when he'll come, I'm impatient for him. My eyes wander towards
the lane sometimes, but if he does come it will be on the day I am not
watching.

Grandmother snorts and says, "Of course he wont come back - he got what
he wanted." But it wasn't like that at all.

I know he'll come one day like he promised, tanned from the Indian sun,
thin from Delhi Belly with henna mehendi patterns on his arms, and
silver rings on his toes. My traveller, your father, and when he sees
you, my little man, he will scoop you up in his arms and love you in a
second.

Like an Indian Summer.