The Lady from London

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At the very southern tip of India, in a town right near Kanniykumari, on Watakotai beach, in a round house that stands completely alone, just west of the wind farm, there’s a woman named Doreen Dahl born in South Africa in 1941 who lives alone and is pretty damned determined to die there by herself.

She has a helper woman, and she speaks a little bit of English and Doreen speaks a little bit of Tamil, but not much.  She learned the alphabet but no one would teach her pronunciation.  Her helper told a friend to go get the two of us when she saw us on the beach, and so he did.  He didn’t speak much English, but he knew enough to say that there was a lady from London in the house and that we might like to talk to her, so we went to the porch in front of the house, and she came out.  He implied, I think, that she was 20 years old, but she was actually 70.  It’s okay though.

 

She’s out there, man.  She’s really out there.  It’s hard to describe and recall everything, but I’ll do what I can.

 

Her parents were German Holocaust refugees (she’s Jewish).  They moved to South Africa and owned and operated a hotel, I believe in Cape Town.

 

She claimed to have met Nelson Mandela at least three times, and said that he had remembered her when he saw her later.  She seemed extremely surprised by that, which made it a little bit more believable, but I don’t know.  She said he told her, “Why didn’t you stay in Africa?!”  I don’t know how he would know that she didn’t.  She said that she tried to join his lorry when he was marching through the city, but didn’t for some reason, but that’s how he first knew of her and never forgot her.

 

She was the first Jewish girl to go to the convent in South Africa, and she was a music major.  She played piano as her main instrument, but said it had been years since she had touched one.  She seemed slightly upset about it when I brought that to her attention.

 

She was born in South Africa, then went up through Africa, then turned right through the middle east and then made it all the way to Indonesia.  When South Africa kicked out the white people, she went to London because it was the only place that would take her, and from there she went to India, where she was, and hadn’t moved.

 

She used to get The Hindu once a month from a lorry, but that stopped four years ago because apparently it was too expensive.  I think she also used to get The Times of London, but that came many months late and also stopped years ago.  I asked what she did for water, and she said a lorry came to deliver it, and that they determined the schedule, not her, so there was no way she could know when she’d have more or less than she needed.

 

She was a little weird.  She insisted that the world would end by the sun falling on top of it.  She said since she was on the equator, she’d die first.  She also seemed a little bit racist, though I couldn’t really tell how benign or malicious it was.  She seemed to think black people had a certain affinity and skill for mining that no one else was capable of.  But she also thought it was “interesting that they made it all the way to India before they started to be exterminated.”  That one kind of threw me.  She also suggested that the sun had a racial prejudice and might fall on top of the other side of the earth first if that were the case.  She also sort of insisted that the wind farm near her house was a nuclear power plant.  And she said that she chose to come here to get away from all the technology. She kept asking, “What if the machines break?”  Well, basically we’d live like we did a few decades ago, not that big of a deal.  But she insisted that they were ruining people and making them mad, and that she’d rather be her own kind of insane than everyone else’s kind of insane.  So she was kind of just a Luddite, or something like that.

 

She never told us how she made enough money to live alone without a job for thirteen years and to ostensibly keep going for another thirteen or so.  She said that she had just gotten lucky and fallen into good places, but never really got around to describing it.

She had an incredibly genuine and beautiful smile, but it came out very rarely.  Her whole face lifted up when she did it.  Spencer noticed it too, and said he was glad that I mentioned it to stop him from feeling crazy.

 

So yeah.  Spencer and I had different reactions to her.  Before this, I had been wondering if I wanted to never-settle-down and just go from place to place forever and have The Most Interesting Life in the Whole Universe.  After seeing her, I decided I definitely didn’t.  She seemed pretty out of it, sort of out of touch, not aware of the world anymore, like she never really made or maintained any meaningful connections, and like she didn’t have much to do anymore.  She said that she talked to herself all the time – and she would even talk to herself while we were sitting on her porch.  Then she’d talk about how she was just talking to herself.  It was pretty bizarre.  I decided I did not want to be like that.  Spencer decided that he definitely did.  Different strokes, or something to that effect.

 

I Googled her later.  I didn’t find anything about her relationship to Nelson Mandela or all the places she said she’d been, but it did seem to bring up some German Holocaust-related sites, and a number of sites saying that she was a lost family member and people were looking for her.  I clicked on those pages, but they had changed a while, and I didn’t check out the Google Cache for some reason.  I thought I would try to help them find her, but I haven’t yet.  I think I’ll try when I have better internet access.