JOHN DREW

Pride of place above the fireplace in the sitting room of our little house in distant Blighty is a painting from North Bengal.

It was actually a bit of a relief to sit on the terrace of the Gezira Pension and have a quiet breakfast before plunging back once more into the traffic of Cairo in search of a carriage to the museum.

The audience for the jatra was all any Marxist theatre director in Kolkata could have wished for.

In memory of the late Mike Franklin, 1949-2024

His five sons/ Were killed and the books...

500 years ago, Edmund Spenser wrote a poem to celebrate a wedding taking place beside the River Thames. Each stanza ends with the refrain: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”.

35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.

The map is part of an exhibition arranged to mark the revival of the Cambridge Majlis, a society (dating from 1891) designed for students from all over the Subcontinent to meet socially to enjoy their commonalities and discuss and debate in a civil way their political differences.

Dr Shahina Ghazanfar, the author of a series of books on the flora of the Middle East who compiled this compendium, explains: “This is not a religious book but about history and culture. It promotes the pleasure of research and learning, I hope as much for my readers as for myself”. 

Szilvia Reif, a student of mine from the (indicatively named) Gandhi School in Pècs, Hungary, wrote a poem that tells what it feels like to be a ‘Gypsy (properly Roma).

Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.

The year is 1721. There are Indians, many no doubt Bengali, visible on the streets of London, some settled down there, others at a loss, mostly sea-farers off the East India Company ships bringing the Indian fabrics that have become all the fashion, silks worn by the rich, cottons by the poor.

Where do you stand on this matter of pulling down statues, a hot topic during the ongoing Black and Indigenous Lives Matter campaigns? Do you favour putting up statues at all? Who, if anyone, would you put one up to?

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, as much at home on the Kali Ghat as in Greenwich Village, is best remembered in Bangladesh on account of his poem, September on the Jessore Road. Year One.

Many centuries ago, Chinese pilgrims came up the Bay of Bengal on their way to Buddhist sites in the Subcontinent. We have no record of their conversations with the people of Bengal but it was the accurate accounts of early Chinese travellers that enabled archaeologists in the 19th century to rediscover the lost Buddhist sites like that inside a hill at Paharpur.

No need to wonder what you are: Bengal’s brightest, closest star in the night sky - though on the Earth none noticed your auspicious birth.

Splashes of blue in the springtime green,

[for Samuel on his 15th birthday]

Furniture dies. Empty now,

Here we are on the Irish border for Hallowe’en, originally a Celtic festival designed to propitiate the ghosts of the dead.