• Suspense

    A first visit to India @dianneanoble1 #RLFblog #RomanticSuspense

    Diane Noble, author of Outcast, shares her memories of
    visiting India.

                The first
    time I visited India I was ten years old, flying back to England with my
    parents and brothers after a three year tour in Singapore. Our RAF Hermes plane
    took almost three days, stopping in several countries to re-fuel, and de-ice
    the wings. We’d travelled out in a troopship, the Dunera – a whole month and
    school lessons every day – but the Suez Canal had been closed so here we were
    in Calcutta, as it was then known. I remember the heat, the highly spiced kofta
    they gave us for breakfast with a fried egg, which none of us could eat, the
    hole in the floor toilet we had to squat over while flies buzzed around us, the
    strange smells and sounds. How could I have known I’d begun a lifelong love
    affair with India?
                A single
    parent for much of the time, I had to wait until my children had grown and
    flown before I could travel to Rajasthan, the princely state of maharajahs and
    palaces. Since then I’ve been all over the country, generally on India’s
    excellent trains, from Delhi and Agra in the north where the Taj Mahal reduced
    me to tears, to beautiful Kerala in the south, the temples of Bhubaneshwar in
    the east and vibrant Mumbai in the west, yet still, time after time I am drawn
    back. Next year I hope to travel the width of the country by train, up to its
    border with Pakistan and then into the Himalayas. My modest house – I spend all
    my money on travel – needs replacement windows but hey!
                Ten years
    ago I volunteered to spend three months teaching English to street children in
    Kolkata. While there I realised what it is I love about the country –it’s the
    people. Despite great deprivation they laugh and are joyful. This time in
    Kolkata proved to be the hardest thing I have ever done. Broken, crumbling
    buildings sit amid lakes of raw sewage; filthy children encrusted with sores are
    homeless; families live on a patch of pavement so narrow they take it in turns
    to lie down. They give birth – and die – there. Yet their indomitable spirit
    shines through.
                I feared I
    couldn’t do it, felt my resolve dying daily amid the horrors and hardship, but
    I started writing a journal and it saved me.
                Imagine your shirt sticking to your back as
    you edge round a goat, swat at flies and cough as smoke from pavement cooking
    fires catches in your throat. After four hours of threadbare sleep you’re
    trying to find the group of street children you’ve come to Kolkata, India to
    teach English to as a volunteer.
                Your ears hurt with the noise –
    shouting, blaring horns, a backfiring bus. A cow stands in the middle of the
    road, munching impassively on an old newspaper, as traffic edges round it. This
    animal is holy and if a driver were to run into it, he would be dragged from
    his car by an angry crowd and beaten up.
                Heat beats on your head like a
    hammer as you search among blackened buildings whose stonework crumbles like
    stale cake. There is a smell of spices and sewage, urine evaporating in hot
    sun.
                When you see the small group it
    takes you an age to cross the road, weaving between rickshaws, yellow taxis,
    tuk tuks festooned with dusty tinsel. The children are so tiny – malnourished –
    with bare feet, cropped hair and laddered ribs, but they shriek with laughter
    when you try to speak to them in Hindi. They stroke the pale skin of your arms
    and clamber on to your knees as you sit, cross-legged and crampy, on the bare earth
    floor. They are a joy, desperate to learn English, desperate to improve their
    position at the bottom of the luck ladder.
                When you get back to your small room
    that evening your feet are gritty and blistered, your chest is raw with exhaust
    fumes and you are unbelievably filthy. Sweat makes white rivulets down the dirt
    on your face and you feel, and doubtless smell, rank.
                By the end of the first week you
    will be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the poverty, despairing at the
    smallness of your contribution. How can you possibly do this for three whole
    months? Whatever were you been thinking of when you signed up?
                Maybe, like me, you’ll start a
    journal and at the end of every day, no matter how tired you feel, you’ll write
    down every detail of your day – how the children are progressing, who made you
    laugh, who can now write their names, how much their poor chests rattle, who
    has the worst sores. It’s a sort of de-briefing you might find cathartic.
                Despite having nothing, the children
    giggle and fool around, laugh and sing, hang on to you, desperate for cuddles,
    Everywhere you go in this dreadful place Bengali men and women will get used to
    seeing you, wave and call out ‘Hello, Aunty’ (a term of respect for women of a
    certain age) At the wayside shrine even jolly, elephant-headed Ganesh will be
    wearing a broad grin.
                My diary covered three months
    and formed the basis for A Hundred Hands which tells the story of Polly who saw
    the plight of the children living on the streets and stayed to help. Outcast
    features the plight of the Dalits, the Untouchables. I have been back to India
    many times. Despite its horrors the country is mesmeric and its people a joy.

    Outcast

    Rose leaves her Cornwall cafe to search for her daughter,
    Ellie, in the steaming slums of Kolkata, India. In the daily struggle for
    survival she is brought to her knees, yet finds the strength to confront the
    poverty and disease and grows to love and respect the Dalit Community she is
    helping. But then there are deaths and she fears for her own safety. Her cafe at home is at risk of being torched, and finally she has to make the terrible
    choice between the Dalits and her own daughter.
    Genre Romantic Suspense
    Book heat level (based on movie ratings) PG
    Publisher Tirgearr Publishing
    Amazon https://www.amazon.co.uk/Outcast-Dianne-Noble-ebook/dp/B01BLL9CVO
    Barnes and Noble http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/outcast-dianne-noble/1123400384
    Kobo https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/outcast-51

    Dianne Noble Social Media

    I think I became a reader before I could walk. While other
    people had childhood memories, I amassed a vocabulary. I was born into a
    service family and at the tender age of seven found myself on the Dunera, a
    troopship, sailing for a three year posting to Singapore. So began a lifetime
    of wandering – and fifteen different schools. Teen years living in Cyprus,
    before partition, when the country was swarming with handsome UN soldiers, and
    then marriage to a Civil Engineer who whisked me away to the Arabian Gulf.
    Most of the following years were spent as a single parent
    with an employment history which ranged from the British Embassy in Bahrain to
    a goods picker, complete with steel toe-capped boots, in an Argos warehouse. In
    between I earned my keep as a cashier in Barclays, a radio presenter and a cafe proprietor on the sea front in Penzance.
    Website www.dianneanoble.com
    Twitter www.twitter.com/dianneanoble1
    Facebook www.facebook.com/dianneanoble