ABSTRACT

As a child, whenever I was sick, my mother would bring out two boxes with which to keep me amused in bed. One was a box of buttons I could endlessly arrange and rearrange and the other was a box of photographs from her past. Amongst these was one of her in a 1920s’ dress and a large hat standing in the Piazza San Marco, feeding the pigeons. She and her Indian husband, my father, had stopped there on their Grand Tour of Europe before embarking in Marseilles for India. The photograph was faded by the time I saw it, all in the same shades of grey and sepia as the pigeons that fluttered about her. It lacked any touch of gold or glitter of glass but it was Venice, my first sight of Venice.