The Erstwhile Buddhist

By Helen Pitt

Part travel romance, part emotional release documenting life in a city unlike any other, even in Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Books
• Release date: Jan 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393391920

Book preview

These memories are dedicated with all my love to my children

Jesse and Rebecca Inman who managed without me for a while.

Also by Helen Pitt

The Strange Free-Fall Of Fred Ryland

Beating The Banana: Breast Cancer and Me

Tales From Pinfold Farm

PROLOGUE

He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and gruelling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again."

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy

The morning I received that first email, I read it out to my husband. It surprised him as much as it had me. We were sitting in the kitchen at home and as it happened, we had been talking about our childhood and all of our old school friends and had been enjoying reminiscing for a while.

I recall it like it was yesterday because my husband was pottering in the kitchen when I started to scroll down my computer screen to reveal a photograph.   There he was in black and white, the subject of this writing.   He was standing, arms folded, outside his workplace. I quietly said to myself, Oh my God, because the facial similarity between him and my husband was unmistakeable.  Now in his fifties, the photograph showed a handsome man with a grey beard and lovely eyes.  Hearing my sigh, my husband called out from the kitchen, What is it? 

I said, It`s a photograph of  *******, he`s just sent one to me. 

There was a slight pause and then my husband said in a voice full of sadness,

Oh Hel, please don`t fall in love with him.

But it was too late. I already had.

1

You know when you fill out a job application and at the end the monitoring form asks you what religion you are?  Well I`ve always ticked the other box, having for many years defined myself as a bit of a Christian and a bit of a Buddhist.

I was pushed and pulled all ways as a child. My mother was agnostic, my father a devout Christian and my brother Al`, a Zen Buddhist so in a spiritual sense I was driven in several directions.  Politically, mum was a true blue while my dad was a raging socialist so it`s no wonder I grew up somewhat confused.  I`m no longer confused; I am a socialist and will never vote Tory until my dying day and I am also a bit of a Buddhist.  Buddhism really speaks to me.

My name is Helen, most of my friends call me Hel.  It is 1967 and my other brother Martin`s sixteenth birthday.

I adored my brother Martin. He is two years older than me.  He and I were extremely close as children in fact you could say we were joined at the hip as we went everywhere together until our late teens when various boyfriends and girlfriends became much more interesting.

As children we loved to play super - hero games.  Tying a bath towel around our necks which magically transformed into a cape, we would zoom around the large flat we lived in, he as Superman and me of course as Supergirl. Martin was a terrible tease and couldn’t let me walk past him without doing something to me. He would trip me up or pinch my arm or anything annoying so that I would retaliate. Then we`d have a full-blown wrestling match on the hall floor which generally ended up with me shouting Submit! Submit!, when my bro` got me into a figure four.

Martin took me roof hopping in our village as a child which involved us climbing up fire escapes and drainpipes to breath-taking heights on top of Woolworth`s roof. From there we would jump across a humungous gap to land on the roof of the bingo hall next door and so on until