Between the Sphynx and the Pyramid

Amen-Ra and my Father in Egypt and India...

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My father in Egypt, ca. 1958. Without Fez. With keffiyeh and ‘crown-band’. Third left in, between the chap with fez and spectacles and the chap with fez and white shirt and shades hanging down. I have no idea who took this photo nor what my father was doing there, except that he was then features editor of the Irish Times, so they might be a bunch of journalists on a tour.

Cairo Museum. My father at the end of the glass cabinet, does not seem very interested in the Mummy within it.

A PENNY ON THE NILE

Amen-Ra,

Ra-men.

Men of the Sun.

Sun of the Father.

Father-Sun.

Father-Daughter.

Isis sails over the sands

While a boy begs a penny

From my Father on the Nile.

Photo by Ruben Hanssen on Unsplash

He never saw such eyes.

He gave the boy a shilling

And from the river banks of the Nile

Rose up droves of children,

For a Penny, or a shilling

From the white man in the keffiyeh

In the Sun.

Amen-Ra.

Sun of the Father.

Those eyes.

That Sphynx.

© Siofra O’Donovan 2024

Photo by Jessica Kantak Bailey on Unsplash

There were other adventures. My father was sent to India by the Irish Times around 1966. He told me he used to like sitting on the steps of the harbour in Mumbai, smoking. It was the first time, he said, he had seen a dead body- or certainly, at least, a floating one in the sea, 18˚ 52′ and 19˚ 04′ and 72˚47′North and 72˚54′ East longitudes. The Arabian Sea to the West and South and Thane creek to the East.

Photo by Ansari Altamash on Unsplash

He told me that he loved the sound of the Indian people saying ‘hotel’ as ‘hooooowtl’ as if the ‘o’ had a fada on it. (An Irish long vowel)

Photo by Ashish Singh on Unsplash

His guide in Delhi told him he had it all arranged for my father to see the Taj Mahal in Agra the next morning. My father hadn’t the slightest bit of interest, and he happened to meet somebody who would bring him that same morning to meet the Prime Minister of India, who must have been Lal Bahadur Shastri, as he is known to not have been very tall this is significant because that next day in Delhi at my father’s ‘hooootel’ his guide appeared, irritated and impatient and asked him where had he been for they had waited a long-long time for him to join them on the tour to the Taj Mahal.

Photo by Raghu Nayyar on Unsplash

My father told him he had had the chance to meet the Prime Minister that morning and, being a journalist commissioned to write a feature on the country, he could not turn down the chance.

“Oh” said the guide to my father, ‘THAT little man.”

For Shastri was not a tall man, he was short. A man very much disliked by the Gandhi- Congress dynasty. When the First Prime Minister of India, Jawarhal Nehru had a heart attack in 1964, Shashtri took the job as fallback while he recovered, somewhat hesitantly. He was a modest man who, as Minister for Transport, took moral responsiblity for the Tamil Nadu railway crash in 1956 that killed 155 people. He was clean, hardworking and quite poor for a Minister. Nehru entrusted Shastri with the prime ministers’ files and with taking decisions. Nehru died, On May 27 1964 and congress picked Shastri for the post of prime minister. He was a man who disliked corruption, and who was detested by the Gandhi dynasty. IN that short time he was PM, Pakistan opened war on India for its seizure of Kashmir. Power was quickly seized by Indira Gandhi in 1966.

Photo by Ashwini Chaudhary(Monty) on Unsplash

Photo by imad Clicks on Unsplash

The Indian people were, my father said, the most beautiful people in the world. I would agree .

Photo by Bella Pon Fruitsia on Unsplash

My father’s Stag Party in the Irish Times, 1954

(Probably) left to right: Donald Smilie, the then Editor. a laughing man who might be Dick Murphy my father with hands in pockets looking happy and drunk, Bill Crampton in spectacles and curly hair, Michael Devine and Gerald O’Donovan, my uncle.

From Little Old Man Cut Short, my father’s memoirs. There seems to have been a second supplement in the Irish Times on India by my father, as by 1970 Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister.

The infamous Pearl Bar, opposite the Irish Times offices on D’Olier Street, Dublin. Now gone, like all the best things in Dublin. And don’t even start me on the Irish Times…