FAREWELL TO THE LOW LANDS

It took me a while to figure out how to write a spiritual post about my recent visit to the Netherlands. This is my conclusion: the universe decided that Holland must be too cold to be comfortable for 11 months out of a year. Also, the country has so many people living on such a small space that you only feel alone when you’re inside a toilet. Even when you’re walking in the middle of a forest with a friend you still need to raise your voice to be heard over the noise of a nearby motorway. You think India is crowed? Think again. I read that Holland is the most crowded country in the world. I guess that observation is true. It’s also one of the most expensive countries in the world. One small bag of Dutch grass has doubled in price over the past 9 years.

According to the editor of the gay krant (gay newspaper) the best days for LGBT-people in the Netherlands are behind us; more gays are being beaten up again and discriminated against compared to the 1990s and more gays are secretive about their sexual orientation.
The only celebrity transsexual in Holland (a stunning looking young girl whom I met at her house in 2004) has been ridiculed for years to such extend that a popular Dutch band decided to release a love-song for her, hoping to change things around for transsexuals. Yet, she is still the subject of ridicule. Poor Dutch transsexuals!
Dutch people appear to be stressed and tense and things have changed so much for the worse that I didn’t feel anything nostalgic. I didn’t miss my country.
Although I unregistered myself as a Dutch resident in 2000, last week I went to the town hall to pay 10 Euros in order to receive an official document stating that I am no longer a Dutch resident. With this statement I can now apply for a new drivers’ license in Bangkok (or get a new passport in any country other than the Netherlands).
“If you leave our country, you are in the hands of God,” said the Dutch-Moroccan employee working at my old town hall.
In the hands of God? Finally something spiritual, I thought.
“Which God? The Christian God or Allah?” I wanted to reply, but I remained silent and paid the 10 Euros and got the document.

I am a Buddhist. Buddhists don’t believe in a God-creator, thus technically I shouldn’t believe in God either. Regarding this I am a little bit of a rebel too, as I love to talk about God to Buddhist monks in Asia.

My visit to my parents place was lovely. They are very sick and in the process of dying (aren’t we all) and I fear this was the last time I saw them alive. Their penthouse is so big, it has a domestic phone system and it takes 5 minutes to reach the nearest toilet from the living room. Finding my father anywhere in his home was easy, as I just needed to follow the trail of urine on the parquet floor. His adult diapers seemed not very effective. In order to find my mother, I just needed to use my nose, as she is still a chain smoker.
I was surprised they both have the energy to still stuff themselves with candy and other fatty fibreless factory produced food items, and they are so angry with the lack of health that they tend to bicker with each other all the time in a most unpleasant manner.
I spent most of my time at their home in the freezing cold of their palatial outdoor rooftop terrace smoking Dutch laboratory grown government approved cannabis in order to speed up my connection to the root of the universe. I had to smoke outdoors as my father didn’t allow me to smoke in the west wing.

The real highlights of my visit had all to do with being reunited with my old Dutch friends. I never realized I never said goodbye to any of them when I left for Asia in 2000. My friends learned about my immigration by reading about it in the media a few years later. Nine years on I thought of reigniting our friendships, but I soon realized they were more interested in experiencing a proper goodbye from me, rather than a proper hello again. Their lives are so different from mine that they no longer feel a connection to me. After saying farewell to all of them, I felt I was ready to go back to Asia.

Another highlight was my visit to my old rowing club in Utrecht. When I walked into the club house I got recognized by all club members and was warmly welcomed. It was here that I agreed to meet with a former junior world champion with whom I had a six-year relationship. I spent an entire chapter on him in my book Pholomolo called “My Loyal Lover Lars”. We never officially broke up our relationship, which we finally did in a very elegant manner in the west wing of my parents’ penthouse. There were plans for him and me to row in a double sculls competition boat a few days later, but the weather changed for the worse and I decided to cancel. My reasoning was that if I enjoyed our rowing session, I would feel bad when realizing that I would not be able to row again, as Thailand has no rowing clubs. If I wouldn’t enjoy the rowing session, I would feel bad too. So I said goodbye to the man I called Lars in my book, and wished him and his new girlfriend, his two cats and his mortgage all the best.

There was a lot to do about the Dalai Lama and his 50 years of living in exile in India around the 10th of March. I had hoped to be invited by the Dutch media to share my thoughts on the matter, but nobody was interested in my ideas either. I received one email from a journalist who wrote extensively about me in the past years. She was interested in meeting me but she finally decided that she was too busy with more urgent matters. My God-fearing Christian Dutch publisher didn’t return my email with my request to meet him. Since I offered him my proposal for my book Pholomolo in 2004, he appears not to be interested in talking to me anymore. I hope he has a good time when he’s visiting church on Sunday mornings. I also hope he realizes he hasn’t been paying my royalties for 5 years now.

I wonder how long it will take before some famous Dutch band writes a love song for me…

So I guess I spent 32.000 baht and 36 hours of traveling just to say goodbye to my country of birth and the people I used to be friendly with, including my parents. I couldn’t wait to travel back to Asia to be reunited with my family.
Last Thursday, 26 March, I travelled from Amsterdam to Hong Kong dressed in a Free Tibet T-Shirt. You should have seen the faces of the Chinese transfer employees at Hong Kong Airport. After a few hours I got on a plane to Bangkok. I showed my passport to the nice Thai gentleman at passport control at Suvarnabumi Airport. The moment he saw my non-tourist visa he said to me: “Welcome home, Miss Renard.”
I nodded. “Kap khun kha. Thank you. It certainly feels that way.”

GOD AND THE PYRAMID OF AUSTERLITZ

A little over 9 years ago I had a life altering experience. It was weeks before I got on a plane and started a new life in Asia. It was a cold, windy, rainy day in February 2000 when I visited the Pyramid of Austerlitz. I even decided to write a little about it in my book Pantau in India.

This is what I wrote:

The next day I drove over to Austerlitz to sit on top of Napoleon’s Pyramid. They had made a start to restore the Pyramid to its former glory. It was Wednesday, February 2nd, 2000. I had made an important decision. I had decided to make this day the Day of my Death.
I climbed up to the top of the pyramid, climbed the ladder that gave access to the plateau and the obelisk. The sun had just come up over the forestry horizon of the Utrecht Hill Ridge and she shone tender yellow bundles of rays through small openings in a dark grey blanket of clouds. I sat in lotus position, rocking and shaking like an oriental monk, staring at the rapidly passing clouds. Like Napoleon, I had stuck my hand in my coat, feeling my heartbeat in the palm of my hand.
Throughout my life I hadn’t met anyone who was truly happy. I had never met anyone who could show me the way to happiness. I was tired of taking my Prozac three times daily. I was tired of not knowing what kind of future I should have. I wanted to end the misery, the pain, the restlessness, the anxiety. I wanted to end my life. Today was the day of my death. Tonight. In the waterbed. I had already switched off the heating system in order to let the water cool down. Sleeping pills. Collected over a period of five months. Enough to kill all the residents of my apartment building. The CD-player switched on. Streisand in random and repeat-mode.
I directed my face to the sky and saw a blue opening in the clouds. I was caught in a bundle of light. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It was as if I received a positive message from the ether. As if lightning struck me from a clear sky, a divine voice seemed to talk to me. I could hear it very clearly.
‘A soldier ought to know how to overcome his grief and the melancholy of his passions; that there is as much true courage in bearing mental affliction manfully as in remaining unmoved under the fire of a battery. To abandon oneself to grief without resisting, and to kill oneself in order to escape from it, is like abandoning the field of battle before being conquered.
‘Napoleon Bonaparte once spoke those historic words, my dear Véronique. It was Me who inspired him to say them. There is no need for you to kill yourself. When you listen to your heart, the stars in the universe will conspire to make your dreams come true. Go. Véronique. Go! GO! Travel through the world and find your destiny! It’s out there for you. You can experience everything you want as long as you listen to your heart and do what it tells you to do.
‘Listen to your feelings. They’re the language I communicate in. As I take an interest in your happiness, I have been trying to send you messages of wisdom, but for years you’ve been ignoring me. And as I fly above you like a crow, my view is much better than yours. I can see good and bad things coming your way. If you listen to your heart, I can let you know in advance what choices to make and which path to take. I know the outcome of every decision you make. Ye be warned. Let me help you, so I can promise you a happy ending. Walk with Me and Thou shalt find happiness. Amen!’
I shook my head. Many people had gone mad after taking drugs and I had been smoking my butt off as well as pumping professionally prescribed chemicals into my brain for almost half a year now. I couldn’t trust my own brain or these strange voices from the sky, no matter whether the voices had good intentions.
I shook my head again as I had felt the strange feeling and hearing the divine voice to be the combined effects of the high amounts of THC and anti-depressants in my blood. I denied hearing the voice.
‘You’re not real. It’s my brain that’s gone mad!’ I shouted at the sky.
The voice disappeared and it immediately started to rain. I descended the pyramid, went back to my car and drove home. I agreed that my life was like the Chinese circus act with the white porcelain plates rotating on flexible sticks. It was meant to fail at some point. My life was like a house of cards that was doomed to collapse. I didn’t need anyone anymore. It was the day of my death.

So, now 9 years on I can look back to that day and conclude that I didn’t kill myself. That night I decided that it was the first day of the rest of my life. Last Saturday, I visited the Pyramid for the first time in 9 years. Now fully restored, it was an interesting experience. I even decided to take a picture of the thing. Goodbye Pyramid of Austerlitz. And thank you God.

IK HOU VAN HOLLAND

I love Holland. That is: it isn’t a bad place to spend a 3-week holiday, despite prices that shock the bloody Jesus out of anyone who’s used to Indian Rupees and Thai Baht. As a former resident of a farming village located only a cow-spit away from the city of Utrecht, I had a wonderful day in that most beautiful city of Holland. The sun was shining lovely, the air was crisp and near freezing point, and the people of Utrecht appeared happy and welcoming. Some of them actually recognized me as that woman who (used to) live/s(d) next door to the Dalai Lama. My immigration from India to Thailand was never headline news in Tulip-country and they still think I live in the Himalayas.
My head protected from the cold by my English bowler hat, I walked through the city centre as a tourist with my digital camera. Interestingly, people don’t tend to take photos of their hometown. When I lived in Utrecht I never bothered to document my city. I had zero photos to show my Asian friends of my hometown. Today I took a hundred of them and I took many photos of stuff Dutch people wouldn’t take photos of: bicycles and tulips.
Completely strange Utrecht-folks invited me into their homes, they offered me joints, coffee, gevulde Koeken, sauzijsenbroodjes and so on, and welcomed me back as if I were a celebrity they had been missing for years. Thanks to all those nice people that were so friendly to me. (Ralf, I wish you well and good luck with your music career.)

The Old Canal in Utrecht City (Oude Gracht, Utrecht)

Something you don't see much outside Holland or China.

Real Dutch tulips, on the Utrecht flower market.

I guess I am the only Dutch passport holder who takes pictures of bicyle parkings. I miss bicycles. It is a Dutch thing I guess, and I miss cycling. Everybody in Holland owns at least one or two bicyles and it's the first choice of transportation in the country. Bless the Dutch and their bicyles.

.

Yesterday was a sad day for me and my parents. Papa needs some more tests and a few weeks of waiting before he finally knows how bad his body has been affected by cancer. I don’t think my mother handles her aorta-problem very well. She requires a lifestyle with healthy food and little stress and that lifestyle doesn’t appeal to her. I fear that my next and last trip to Holland will be one to say my final goodbyes to them.

Also, it’s been 50 years that the Dalai Lama fled into exile. The European media are covering the plight of the Tibetans 24/7 which gives me a good feeling. My heart broke when I saw His Holiness speaking firm words about the mistreatment of his people inside Tibet. I recognised most Tibetan faces that appeared on NOS-News. Dharamsala has been my home for 7 years, the Tibetan refugees have been my friends ever since and they never left my heart. I had the intention to be in Dharamsala on the 10th of March 2009. Unfortunately, because of my parents absence of health, I chose to travel to Holland instead. But the 10th of March is special day for the Tibetans, as on this day, 50 years ago, the Tibetan uprising against Chinese occupation occurred. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans were killed (some believe over 1 million), and still they need to fear for their lives. Last year, as we all remember vividly, on the 10th of March 2008, the young Tibetans in Lhasa started burning down Chinese businesses and fighting the Chinese security police and armed forces. It all started with a peaceful demonstration by a few monks. Lhasa was on fire and ever since, the Chinese government has closed down Tibet for the media, travellers and tourists. Chinese troops march the streets and Tibet has become one big prison where people cannot go in, nor go out.
Though still holding on to his non-violence policy, I hope that one day Tibet will be free, preferably by means of sincere negotiations with Beijing. In Holland we have an expression: Wie niet luisteren wil, zal het moeten voelen. In English: If they don’t want to talk and listen, they will need to feel it. In other words: If you don't listen to me, I'll smack you in the face. I believe in karma. Beijing will one day get a big smack in the face.

MONKEY BUSINESS (KIND OF)

I woke up at 10.30 this morning after a night of not sleeping well. I left the guestroom in the west wing and walked to the living room in the south wing where I found my mother behind her computer playing a digital card game.
“Good morning, Mama.”
“Good evening. Jesus Holy Christ Veer, it’s half past ten.”
“Yeah, I know. Papa and I drank too much last night and combined with the Valium and the Dutch grass that I was smoking with my head out of your guestroom window, I just sank into a coma. Where’s Papa?”
“He went to the hospital to get the result of the cancer radiation treatment.”
“So today he’ll find out whether he’ll live or die? I mean, whether he’ll live a little longer, as we all die some day, whether we like it or not. Tomorrow I could get hit by a tuktuk and die at 44.”
“For Christ sake, Veer, there are no tuktuks in Holland. It’s more likely that you’ll get hit on the head with a hammer by one of those Muslim foreigners who rob old people from their money at ATM machines. Or those other immigrants from Romania and Yugoslavia and that trash from Morocco.”
“I am not old and I am strong enough to beat up a guy of any nation. Well, I can’t believe Papa didn’t ask me to come with him to the hospital. I could have driven him in his Mercedes. If he gets the bad news, someone needs to be with him. Why aren’t you with him?”
“Jesus Holy Christ, Veer, I just got out of the bloody hospital myself. I am not allowed to strain myself or stress myself out of my life.”
Mother stuck a cigarette in her mouth while another one was still burning in her ashtray.
“If you want breakfast you can get it yourself, Veer. There’s still coffee in the pot, but it's two hours old.”
“I drank 4 glasses of hot water already and I don’t eat before I do my yoga. I’ll have something later. Do you have any healthy food in the house? I can’t eat junk food after yoga.”
“O. Yoga. Is that the reason why you’re not dressed yet, walking around in your underwear in my penthouse?”
“Mother Fucking Christ, you pulled me yourself out of your vagina, and now you have a problem with me walking around in my underwear? We’re in Holland, not Thailand.”

I started with 44 sun greetings, some seated twists, low lunges, hero virasana, my favourite pigeon kapotasana, followed by pashchimottanasana and a bunch of half prayer twists. I ended with a left and right tree vrikshasana, balancing myself on one leg with the other one in an intricate position placed against my inner thigh, and hands in Namaste.”
“You’re too skinny,” Mama said while watching me.
“Well, if I looked like a pig I wouldn’t be able to put both feet in my neck at age 44, Mama.”
“I know. At your age I was already fat like a…. well…”
“Pig.”
“I don’t understand why you are torturing yourself by doing all those exercises every day and denying yourself tasty food.”
Still balancing in tree-position, I said, “Tasty food? Junk food you mean, Mama. Papa and you have been fat as long as I can remember. I don’t want to be like you two. I can do things with my body girls half my age can’t even do. My husband is much younger than I am and he looks like a movie star so I need to work my arse off because he can get any girl he wants. Until now he hasn’t found anyone better than me. That is why I am working my arse off and eating healthy food. Capice?”
“I can see your pussy when you position yourself like that!”
“Jesus Holy Christ on the cross, Mama, can you please just remain in silent position behind your computer so that I can finish my yoga, please?”
“But I can see your pussy.”
I looked down. “You can’t see my vagina; I am wearing underwear. I think you see things that aren’t there. Well, I take that back. It’s there, but I am wearing underwear.”
“Jesus Christ Veer, I saw your pussy, for Christ sake.”
“So what? The day after tomorrow I am going to the Family Spa Sauna in Houten with my girlfriends so everyone can see my pussy; men, women and children. I don’t give a shit if people see my pussy. It’s beautiful enough to be seen.”
One minute silence.
“Well, at least you don’t have to feel embarrassed about your body. You look good. Like a model. By the way, how is your pussy doing? Still happy?”
“Very well, Mama. Very happy.”
“So you’re happy with it?”
“Yes Mama. I am happy with her.”
“So it was worth the operation and the pain?”
“Jesus Mama, it’s been 30 years ago, for Christ sake. I don’t even remember. And yes, I am very happy with my pussy and my young flexible husband and my skinny flexible yoga body and you can’t begin to imagine what kind of fun we have with our bodies. Do you know that we can do every position of the Kama Sutra without the need to be hospitalized afterwards? Tantric yoga is absolutely fabulous.”
“Well, I am happy for your Tantra. I can’t remember the last time I had had sex with your father.”
“Yeah, must have been years before I was born.”
“O shut up, Veer, for Christ sake, Jesus on the cross. I have never cheated on your father. Stupid, I know, but true. Could have had so much more fun. I only had your father inside me and now he doesn’t even have balls anymore because they castrated him. Prostate cancer, bladder cancer, testicle cancer, tumor in leg, they took everything away. Not that it matters because we hadn’t had sex in ages anyway, and actually I never enjoyed it. Not with your father. Do you enjoy it?”
“Yah. Very much. I spend 4 hours a day doing it. For free.”
“Four hours, for Christ sake?”
“Three hours at night for my sake, and an additional one hour when I wake up. I like sex in the morning. It recharges my battery. And my dearest little heart is like a 17-year-old boy. Insatiable. Oy!”
“You could have made some serious money with that activity if you’d been a prostitute.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re right. Those Thai Kathoey earn more money per hour than I do. I need to sell an awful lot of books to get the same kind of money they do in only one evening. And they just have to lay on their backs staring at the ceiling.”
“Veer?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Is it possible for men to see the difference between your pussy and those of other women?”
“No, mine looks better. I had a great surgeon. At 44, my pussy still looks like that of a 16 year old girl. I have shown my pussy to some befriended top surgeons in Thailand and they all thought that my Dutch doctor has done a great job in 1984. It was my surgeon who taught many Thai surgeons in later years.”
“I have never seen your pussy.”
“Mama, Jesus Fucking Christ on the cross, Maria, Joseph and all the apostles, you’re not going to ask me to show you my pussy.”
“Well, I am just curious what it looks like. You’re my daughter. I gave birth to you. I pulled you out of my womb myself because nobody was home because your father was getting the doctor out of his bed, for Christ sake. You are my own flesh and blood. I want to see your pussy.”
I unpositioned myself out of my half warrior position and walked towards mother and her laptop computer. Standing in front of her, I pulled down my underwear.”
“Holy bloody Jesus, that looks so real.”
“Beautiful, huh?" I demonstrated my private parts. "And see this, I have a clitoris and a clitoral hood as well.”
“And does it hurt when you have sex? Do you get wet or do you need lube?”
“I have a mucous membrane, so my vaginal lining is very much like vaginas of other healthy sexual active women. It gets wet when it gets stimulated. And believe me, I get a lot of stimulation in Thailand.”
“Is that guy of yours good for you? Is he cheating on you?”
“No mother. He loves me, believe it or not. I adore my man. I always tell him how beautiful he is, I adore his penis, I never nag and complain, I am always nice and respectful and I never fight with him. I make him laugh, I dance for him naked, I make him feel proud of himself and me. If I were a grumpy old fat pig of a complaining bitch like so many other women, I wouldn’t have such a great relationship and my husband would be sticking his penis into young Thai concubines. But I know how to make a relationship work and I work on it every day. It doesn't happen all by magic; it is hard work. But I love my job of loving my man. And that is why you have a happy daughter and a happy son-in-law and happy grandchildren.”
“Well, that’s nice. I need to rest now. You know, my aorta is still not okay and I need to lie down on my bed in the afternoon. You can use my computer if you want. Are you going to write something today?”
“Yeah, I thought of writing something about monkeys. I used to have a lot of monkeys in and around my home in India.”
“Monkeys. I see.”
“How’s your English, Mama?”
“Pretty good but I don’t read it very well.”
“Do you sometimes read my stories on my weblog?”
“Nah, too difficult. My English is not that good. I tend to fall asleep after reading one sentence in English. And why would I read your weblog, you always tell me what you experience anyway, in Dutch.”
“Good. You won't miss a thing, honey. My weblog stories are all boring, I only write about religion and the 8-fold Buddhist path. Nothing you would be interested in.”
“Jesus Christ, Veertje, thank you for showing me your pussy. You know I love you. Pussy or not, but I love you. I hope you know that.”
“Yeah. I love you too, and the Holy Goddamn Christ knows it too, for fuck sake.”
“And your father loves you too. Maybe he doesn’t always tell you that he does, but he does love you.”
“That’s nice to hear. Have a nice rest, Mama. And please wake up, because I am not ready to have a dead mother yet. I will wait for father to get home and hear him out about his cancer-thing.”
“I hope he doesn’t piss on the floor like yesterday. He can’t hold up his pee anymore and he refuses to wear diapers.”
“Mama, I'd rather pee on the floor too rather than in a diaper. Just ask the domestic help to follow him in his wake with a sponge and latex gloves.”

I am not sure how my mother would react if she would be reading my cliterature, but what the fuck, I am old enough now to decide what to put on my weblog or not.

I am planning to write something about monkeys tomorrow.

SOME THINGS LIKE GOD ARE JUST INEXPLICABLE

Since Friday I am in the Netherlands to visit my very terribly sick and very aging parents. This morning my mother decided to run over a tiny spider with her walker in the kitchen, complaining about those bastards son of a bitch-spiders that find the outside too cold and manage their way into their million dollar penthouse. I was shocked. Killing an innocent spider with the wheels of your walker? Mother! So I had a conversation with my Mama about Indian wildlife before lunch. I think it wasn’t very beneficial to Mama’s recovery and she said she needed a few hours of solitary rest in her deluxe bedroom in the east wing, which gave me the opportunity to sit behind her laptop with internet connection to type up this story.

Last night I already shocked the Bloody Jesus out of my parents by eating Dutch Hutspot with chopsticks and by verbally offering them Reiki treatments in order to scare the cancer out of them. Reiki? Are you going to touch us? With your hands?
“Veer, no thank you. You’re not going to touch us in any way, we’ve got a nurse for that.”
“Who’s Veer?” I thought. O ya, I used to be called Veertje by the Dutch (short for Veronique). It means Little Feather. A lovely Native American Cherokee or Apache name (I guess) for a Dutch girl. My last name “Renard” is French for Fox, so Little Feather Fox sounds pretty exotic for someone who's surrounded by cows, tulips, cheese, windmills and wooden shoes.
For the past nine years people call me Pantau or Tau or Tao and these days Veer sounds like a different person to me. To make a long story short, I was talking to my mother about my wildlife in India. I told her that, once, I lived together in my room with Jimmy; a large female spider, the size of a Dutch male hand. She lived behind a tin trunk opposite of my mattress. In my trunk I kept my traditional Tibetan costume, boots, shirt and hat, one of those with four fur flaps, which I would wear on special occasions, thus little need for me to open the trunk every day and disturb Jimmy.
I called her Jimmy, not because she was a female-to-male transgender cross-dressing spider, but because she was a very large spider that never revealed her true gender to me until she popped out a thousand or so petit mini-spiderlettes. Anyway, Jimmy and I bonded. Am I not scared of spiders the size of hands? O hell Jesus, I surely am. But after living in India for a while you get used to things, including spiders and other wildlife. When you see a scorpion in your bathroom you don’t call 911, you just observe the scorpion, you arrange for a piece of cardboard and a bowl, catch the scorpion and release him in nature, which was only one foot away in my situation. I also believe there is no 911 in India. 911 in India comes in the form of a bucket of sand near a stove or an auto rickshaw to the nearest hospital.
I was surrounded by nature on my mountain top-town of Dharamsala, India, the hometown of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Jimmy would spend the entire day behind the tin trunk and not show her face until I would switch on my little television to watch one of 45 satellite channels provided to me by the local Himalayan cable-television project for 150 rupees (a few dollars) per month. I enjoyed watching a Chinese-type version of MTV, watching lovely Chinese singers of the female and male variety sing pop ballads, but I also enjoyed watching V Channel Asia that tends to focus on Japanese and Korean singers and pop groups such as Super Junior, Ken Hirai, Angela Aki, An Café, F.T. Island, and Howl.
If I would not use my TV as a music producing device, I would watch American Idols on Star World. And I must say, I love American Idols, and so did Jimmy. Every evening we watched television together, and when we were done, Jimmy would hide behind the tin trunk and I would blow out my candle stick or switch off my Tibetan lamp. I can’t believe we lived together for over 6 months.
One day she suddenly had a lot of children sitting on the back of her hairy back (her back was the size of a Dutch egg) so it could hold a lot of spiderlings. And then, one day, she was gone. She had disappeared from my petit room. Rather rude; she didn’t even shake hands, she had 8 of them; she didn’t Namaste me, or thanked me for accommodating her for such a long period of time for free. I always wondered where she got her food from, because there was little to eat in my room. What do spiders eat? And is it possible for a pregnant spider to go without food and drink for such a long time? Perhaps something for me to Google up.
Interestingly, that day I discovered she had accidentally left behind two of her children. Accidentally I say, because I don’t think she was a bitch of a spider. The two little spiders were the size of fleas and they found their way to my little washroom/bathroom. It had a sink with a little metal thing above it to put my toothbrush on. Against the wall was a very unusable mirror as well as a water heater and shower-thingy. Very luxurious for Indian standards. There was even a device to pee and poo in.
Anyway, two of Jimmy’s children had found a new place to stay in that little bathroom, in the right upper corner very close to the ceiling. I noticed one time that they actually drank water. They would come down from the ceiling at night and go to the metal thing above the sink that always had some drops of water on it. They would drink from the water droplets and then climb back to their right upper corner and stay there in a very little web-like housing.

Dear reader, I have been meditating a lot on what goes on in the minds of insects, whether they enjoy their lives, how they find their fulfilment, or if they are just happy by doing nothing for 6 months behind a tin trunk, be happy with a little slurplette of water every evening or watching American Idols on television. Life behind a tin trunk doesn’t sound appealing to me, but having said that; living in India with a monster-spider in your room doesn’t sound very appealing to most people in the West either. Yet I am a happy person, still. I was never bothered by the two children of Jimmy. They grew up in my bathroom, catching little fly-thingies from the air, and drinking water from the area around my toothbrush. I have never seen them in my sleeping area, and they never bothered to watch TV together with me. One day, when they were about 6 months old they left my home. They were the size of a peanut and probably had had a look through the little air vent at the wonderful pine trees that surrounded the building I lived in and thought: that would make a better and more exciting accommodation, perhaps we can find some girlfriends in one of those trees and catch some food in our spider webs to offer to our spider chicks.

For some inexplicable reason I always thought that the two little spiders were male; two brothers. I don’t know why, there were no spider penises visible to the naked eye and believe me, I had better things to do than looking for penises on very small spiders. Nevertheless, they always occurred to me as males, but I can’t explain why. Some things, like God, are just inexplicable.

Next time I am going to tell you a little more about Indian wildlife. I have a few monkey-stories that will blow your mind.

For now, greetings from a freezing cold Holland. Oy vey.