by Eleanor Wood
If anything, I envy her faith. I really do. She has this trust in the universe that everything is going to be OK, which I just do not have. I wish I did. I don’t know if I believe everything is going to be OK, which is a bit depressing. I definitely don’t believe everything happens for a reason, or that people are essentially good. If I believe one thing, it’s that you can never completely know or trust another person. Ever. My nan genuinely believes that ‘the good Lord’ is totally looking out for her. She feels like she can count on it, and goes about her life accordingly.
If I did have faith, which I do not, I think I’d probably be embarrassed about it. I wouldn’t admit it out loud. I like to sort of semi-believe in things that I don’t really believe in, that I can laugh at. I am from the generation where everything must be ironic, for whom sincerity or – God forbid – earnestness is embarrassing. At school, you had to pretend to be nonchalant about everything or people would laugh at you, and I have never really grown out of that.
It’s why I like doing things that are so ridiculously woo-woo, there is no option but to laugh at them myself first. I keep crystals all over the house. I wear a million good luck charms – you can generally make a pretty educated guess at how depressed/disturbed I currently am by how many talismanic charms I am carrying about my person at any one time. I live off lentils and Marmite spaghetti, yet I think nothing of paying people vast amounts of money to open my chakras and cleanse my energy and, basically, tell me everything is going to be OK when I don’t believe it myself. My house is a tip because I don’t have time to clean it; I say I can’t afford a cleaner, but I do have a shaman. Sometimes I know my own priorities are fucked. I don’t even know if I believe in any of these things. Yet at the same time I don’t care. I tell myself it’s like therapy or massage or whatever – it’s just getting to be self-indulgent for an hour, which is always nice. But this doesn’t really explain why I still go to the fortune-teller even when I cut my own fringe with the kitchen scissors because apparently I can’t afford a professional haircut.
Maybe I do believe in these things, but I’m just too embarrassed to admit it out loud. At school, we used to make up fake band names in order to catch out girls we thought were too ‘try-hard’ or jumping on a bandwagon: ‘hey, have you heard the new single by the Dustbin Lid Spaceship Horses? It’s psychedelic … Ha ha, no, you haven’t – I just made it up. You’re such a try-hard.’ I still live in fear of this.
Or, even worse, that time I had a crush on a nice boy called Tony because he had long hair in a ponytail. He was a couple of years older and so I didn’t realize he was considered uncool in his year. The ponytail was just a red herring and he was boring and didn’t like anything cool at all. I only found this out after I kissed him, and then everyone thought it was hilarious and I had to pretend I never even liked him. I still feel bad about that, but I think he got married to someone else so he’s probably over it these days.
My nan is utterly unembarrassed about her faith, which is both baffling and awe-inspiring to me. I don’t know how she does it. No offence to her or to organized religion, but I’d feel so cringey about that. Nan rarely feels cringey about anything, which is a form of staunchness I totally aspire to.
For my unrelentingly ironic, Alanis Morissette generation, this is unthinkable. Earnestness is our kryptonite. Sometimes being constantly ironic is exhausting, not to mention dispiriting. I guess if I had to sum up my religious convictions, it would be some combination of:
Burning sage in the kitchen to get rid of the spirit of ex-boyfriends, while drinking wine
Thinking a new shampoo is going to change not only my hair but my life
The generous and joyous spirit of the rebooted Queer Eye
Joan Didion
Cher
The way I feel in my chest when the na na nas really kick in towards the end of ‘Hey Jude’.
While I’m doing yoga every day, Nan talks about wanting to go to a service at the village church in Benaulim. It’s a huge, modern white building that was built surprisingly recently. It’s one of the main local landmarks and everyone we speak to is very proud of it. However, we also learn that the service starts every morning at six o’clock. The people here are obviously more dedicated than those at home. I don’t really know anyone who goes to church, but I definitely know even fewer people who would go to church at six in the morning. They might not even make it to a really hipster exercise class at that sort of hour.
We visit a lot of churches over the course of our trip, but we never make it to a service. I tell Nan that she doesn’t need to worry. I think she probably gets a free pass for skipping church for a few weeks. She is unfailingly kind to everyone we meet, and endlessly patient with me, who can be moody and annoying to the point of total ungodliness.
So, although she does not pay him an official visit the whole time we are in India, I am pretty sure that her god will not hold it against her.
November 2017
During the months before going away, as well as seeing my therapist for an hour every Wednesday, I have been having another kind of counselling with a friend of mine.
My friend Rana is a shaman. I first went to see her when I was at my lowest ebb, a few months after Stepdad disappeared, when I was still incapable of functioning as a normal human. She knew nothing about my situation (she had asked me not to tell her in advance), but she put her hands on my chest and wept. She said she could hear me saying ‘how could he? how could he?’, repeatedly. It wasn’t a boyfriend, she said – it was a different kind of male figure.
My mum went to see her too. At the time, Mum believed her luck had run out; she felt as though someone had put a curse on her. We both left Rana feeling better than we had before.
Rana and I stayed in touch over the years and I went to see her every so often. The first time, she was living in a flat above a Subway in Brighton, with a tiny kitten she had recently adopted, who stayed curled up by my side the whole time I lay on the floor in her sitting room. She has since moved to the country, where she has many animals and a special practice room.
I would usually visit Rana in the midst of a crisis. Just being in her presence made me feel better, always. She’s that sort of a person. She’s much prettier than I ever imagined a shaman would be, and surprisingly down to earth – the perfect combination of ethereal and ordinary. She’s special, but straight-talking; there’s magic to her, but no bullshit. She’s only a couple of years older than me; she has the face of an old-school film star, with a lilting Welsh accent and intricate hand tattoos.
When K and I were in the midst of breaking up, she told me that my mum, K and I were siblings in a past life. I was the youngest and I had died, when I was still a child. K and my mum had tried to look after me, but they couldn’t and they were tormented by it; that’s why they were still both here, trying their best to look after me. I don’t know why this didn’t sound completely bonkers but it didn’t. For some reason, it instantly rang true.
I rang my mum to tell her about this revelation.
‘Mum? Rana said you, me and K were siblings in a past life.’
‘I know. I was the eldest, obviously.’
‘That’s exactly what she said!’
‘Shit. I have no idea where that came from. It just came out of my mouth.’
I went to see Rana again when I was in the midst of the ensuing rebound situation.
‘Use contraception,’ was her surprisingly practical advice. ‘I’m saying that not as a shaman but as your friend. Be careful right now. To quote the great RuPaul: don’t fuck it up.’
A few years later, not long after the Bad Boyfriend experience, Rana sent me an email out of the blue. She was studying to become a shamanic teacher, learning how to guide people to do their own shamanic journeys. She needed students to practise on, for free – would I be interested?
As these things always are with Rana, it was perfect timing. So, every week for six weeks, she came round to my house. Her presence made
me feel immediately better. We would drink camomile tea and then I would lie on the floor in my spare room and learn how to do my own shamanic journeying.
This involved lying down on the carpet, wearing a blindfold and headphones, with tribal drumming playing in my ears. I had to think of an ‘access point’ in order to travel to ‘upper’ or ‘lower world’. According to the ‘shamanic map’, we live in middle world (it’s all very Lord of the Rings) and can travel to the upper and lower world, in order to explore and ask spirit guides a question. The access point I visualized was very prosaic: a tree I like in the park at the end of my road.
The first time, nothing happened.
‘Your energy is stuck because he’s still here,’ she told me.
I knew exactly who she meant.
‘I can practically see him in the room. His energy is all over your space. I can feel his anger.’
She cleanses my house and me along with it. We burn palo santo (sacred wood from South America). She has satisfyingly chunky maraca-like instruments that make the loudest rattle known to human ears, used to break up energy. She rattles them all over the place. She draws his energy out of me, like she’s sucking it through a straw from a point in the middle of my forehead.
When she’s finished, I feel like I’ve lost about half of my body weight. I can feel the bad vibes leave me. At that instant, we both jump as we hear a sharp smashing sound. It sounds like one of the upstairs windows has broken. Without exchanging a word, we both run around the house in a panic, trying to find what it was that made such an alarming noise.
We look at each other and burst out laughing. Did we both imagine it? The windows are all intact. Nothing is visibly broken.
It’s only on closer inspection that I realize a delicate glass vase in my bathroom fell into the bath – the bathtub is full of minuscule, glittering shards that take days to fully disappear. Even after I sweep up several times, I keep finding tiny slivers.
I say ‘fell’, but in reality that vase must have somehow leapt. It had been there for years, in exactly the same place. It was not anywhere near the edge of the window ledge it was sitting on.
I still can’t explain it, but the following week Rana came over again and I lay down on the floor with my blindfold and my headphones on, and I did a shamanic journey so effortlessly it was like I’d been slipping between dimensions all my life.
Rana recorded all of our sessions, while I narrated them out loud. (‘I’m walking down the road, past the garage, past Natalie’s house and the pub, over the road and into the park … I can feel the grass under my feet and I’m going to climb up my tree now …’) I was glad she did, because afterwards I would have no recollection of the details. It would feel like no time at all had passed, but also like I had somehow been on an epic hero’s odyssey.
I went under the earth and above the sky. I swam in a silver lake and climbed jagged mountains that looked like zigzags a child had drawn. I crawled through moss and into caves. I explored a crystal city. I walked through fields and I could feel my feet getting wet.
I felt cold and I felt hot. I tunnelled through the earth with my bare hands and when I came back I was genuinely surprised my fingernails were not ragged and filthy. A hare told me to be patient. I chased a girl through a forest before I realized she was me as a child.
The thing is with all this, which Rana says herself: it doesn’t matter whether you believe in any of it at all, as long as it makes you feel better. It was making me feel better. Just being around Rana made me feel better, and I felt like maybe she was giving me a little bit of her magic. God knows I’d needed it. It made me feel stronger.
In our last session together, she asked me to have a think in advance about a question I wanted to ask. I would write my intention down, repeat it out loud three times, and then I would journey to find a spirit guide who I could ask my question. This culmination of all our work felt important; I had to make it count.
I naturally assumed my question would be about boys. I thought about the Bad Boyfriend, and a bit wistfully of The Lecturer, on whom I was pinning far too many hopes. Instead, I found myself asking about my one true love. The one who had been there all along, right under my nose, just like in all the best romantic stories.
I asked about writing.
I love writing – always have, always will – but I had been struggling. I didn’t want to write another book if I didn’t have something to say. I didn’t want to keep writing the same sort of thing over and over again, but I didn’t know what to do next. I had spent months slaving over a difficult three-quarters of a novel before deciding it was useless and abandoning it. I was out of ideas.
All I knew was I had to do something that truly excited me. There were more than enough books in the world already – the world certainly didn’t need mine just for the sake of it. Unless I had a great idea that really spoke to me, I wondered if I should consider giving up. But I knew I really, really didn’t want to. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. And yet no ideas would come.
Maybe shamanic journeying would help inspiration to strike me, which would be really good timing, because the trip to India was coming up in just a few weeks so I’d have a month off. If I could hit on a good idea before then, I could spend my holiday writing, using the time to get productive.
‘What is my true purpose in writing?’ I asked.
The answers never come in words. That would be too easy. They’re not always as dramatic as inexplicably smashed glass, either. Sometimes they come to me like watching a film on a flickering screen. Once I felt a hand pressing on my chest and felt like I was having a vision, like it was being pushed into me. Sometimes it was just a feeling, or a flash of something that made no sense at the time, like a lost puzzle piece that later falls into place.
In this final journey, I could see myself walking on the edge of the coast, the sea to one side of me. I could feel the sun on my back, my eyelids full of red and heat. I felt peaceful, like I didn’t need to hurry.
‘It’s all already there,’ a voice said to me. ‘You just need to write it down. You’ll know what to do.’
It’s only when I’m taking one of my long walks on the beach by myself, the Arabian Sea to one side of me, that I realize I have seen this exact scene before. And I know what to do.
Present Day
‘Nan and RJ: A Love Story’. I’m pretty sure that if and when they make a heart-warming British rom-com about our jolly, intergenerational trip to India, that’s what it will be called.
All of my friendships with the local people I meet on this trip pale into total insignificance compared to Nan and RJ.
Nan becomes friends with everyone. Her ability to speak fluent Urdu and to chat to every human being she encounters has an effect that is something like magic. She seems to attract people wherever she goes, and soon knows their entire life stories.
She can often be heard saying sentences that I would not dream of, such as:
I’m going round to have dinner with that nice family who run the corner shop.
I’m going out for lunch with that taxi driver who took me into town the other day when it was raining.
That nice girl who lives over the road is coming round for coffee; you know, her husband’s left her and she’s bringing the children with her.
Here in India, the breakfast waiters are some of her favourite new friends, as are the buggy drivers. The buggies, we have to admit, have been an actual godsend. You can request one any time, to take you across the vast grounds, from the restaurant to the pool or back to the room. If it’s quiet, sometimes we just request a little tour. Ann and I help Nan and Rose to get in, then we perch on the back and hitch a lift along with them. At first I feel mildly guilty about this, as if I should be jogging alongside instead, but then I see quite a lot of guests my age and younger taking them just because they’re lazy or drunk, or it’s a bit too hot.
RJ, though, he is the one. Her true love on this holiday. The instant chemistry between them
is so bizarre, it’s quite unsettling. RJ is the assistant reception manager. I guess he is in his twenties. He’s skinny and quite nice-looking in a very preppy, clean-cut sort of a way. His hair is very, very neat.
At first I think his manner is so obsequious, it makes me vaguely suspicious. However, I am not permitted to say anything remotely critical of RJ, Nan’s favourite human being in the Goa area, her sisters and granddaughter included.
His reception desk is behind a glass door that we have to walk past every time we go in and out of our rooms. Every time, without fail, RJ catches sight of us and comes running outside as fast as he can so that he doesn’t miss us. Well, he doesn’t want to miss Nan. He doesn’t appear to give much of a shit about the rest of us.
‘Madam, madam!’ he cries as he comes trotting out, holding out his arms.
‘Oh God, here comes your boyfriend,’ Ann and I can be heard to mutter.
Nan and RJ then embrace at length, as if they are recently reunited long-lost relatives. Then she keeps her arms around his waist a little longer than I am comfortable with. She grins like a smitten schoolgirl when he is around. They obviously both enjoy this slightly weird interaction, so I’m not sure why it bothers me.
‘You’re my favourite, RJ!’ Nan will say, patting his arm. ‘Such a lovely boy.’
‘It is you who is my favourite, madam,’ he will reply solemnly. ‘It is a pleasure to do anything I can for you.’
As we head back to our room, they always crane their necks to wave at each other until we go out of sight, me chuntering about it all the way.
‘He’s a bit of a creep, Nan.’
‘Oh, stop it. He’s so sweet, such a lovely boy. I love him.’
‘You love him? Really?’