When my mother was a little girl.

My mother was Swedish. When she was three, she, looking at an encyclopaedia picture of the river Ganga , pointed it out to my grandmother. My grandmother looked at it and said “Yes, I know you will go there one day and never come back.” My mother left Sweden when she was 20 , came to India and visited Sweden only once after that.

She would tell me stories of her childhood, of how she and her brother had to go through a wood to reach their school, of how she would go skating down streams at a speed I could not imagine, of how in the summer holidays she earned pocket money by picking berries…I forget which kind, of how she would sit for hours in farmhouses of friends because kitten had fallen asleep on her lap and she could not bear to wake him up, of how her uncle had brought up a moose baby, of the night her father encountered a ghost and several times after that, of Christmas nights when a bowl of porridge and milk was left in the barn for the elves to eat, of the Christmas baking that would begin late October....so much more...

Then she would tell me stories of how her family sent gift parcels of food, clothes, books, crockery, cutlery and what not to war devastated Germany and of the many friends that were made because of.

So many stories….I will try my best to recall them and write them down….I hope I remember them all.