Here’s to Hilda

Why not, I sigh to my friend Jay when she suggests that perhaps another trip to India might be the fix I need. Actually, it’s the best idea I’ve heard in ages. I stare around the familiar four corners of my bedroom. I mean, it’s not like there’s much here for me to stick around for.

I cast my mind back.

Nine months ago, I had been kicking up my heels (or rather flapping my flip flops) in the Pink Palace city of Jaipur. I was just a few months in to my Indian Slummer adventure and really beginning to find my mojo. I’d become acclimatised to the dirt and somewhat anaesthetised to the intermittent bouts of Delhi Belly. India had officially grown on me. I was relaxed, carefree – I may not have quite arrived at destination hippy chick, but I had moved a long way away from neurotic-bitch-from-hell. In fact, I remember thinking how it was the first time in years that I’d felt truly alive.

Then bam…my world came tumbling down.

It was late at night when my Dad Skyped me with the shocking news. My Nana Hilda had been rushed into hospital. Her prognosis: decidedly bleak. She wasn’t expected to live more than a few days. I was stunned. She may have been 92, but Nana was one spunky lady, surely the doctors had got it wrong? However the tone of Dad’s voice told me that this wasn’t the case. There was absolutely no question about my next move. I jumped on the first plane home. And mercifully, I made it back in time to kiss her goodbye.

Nana had been my rock. My guardian angel. My best friend. When she died, so did a little piece of me. That which remained found the grief simply too hard to handle. 

So I hit the “fuck it” button.

Drink, drugs and drama ensued as I spiralled steadily into an imaginative cocktail of debauched depravity. I totally lost the plot. Two months later I turned 40. And that’s when I completely slid off the cliff, circled the drain and landed in a cesspit of despair.

Since then I’ve been in self-imposed exile. Interned in my duvet. A quilted hostage. I’ve tried to snap out of it. But neither medication nor meditation has so much as perforated my dark armour of woe.

If Nana were here now, she’d be force-feeding me Rugelach biscuits (these delicious, sugary squares of Jewish stodge that she often made for me) until I’d pulled myself together. But since she’s not here – and I don’t have her recipe – I crack out my credit card instead. Can India save me? Who knows. But I owe it to myself – and to Hilda – to go and find out.