Read Online The Truth About Julia: A Chillingly Timely Psychological Novel by Schaffner Anna - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Schaffner Anna
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her back to health. I still remember the moment she walked through passport control: straight and bright-eyed and full of anticipation, wearing the cargo pants we chose together and a white pullover, her hair braided into a long, thick plait. She turned back three times to wave at us all, blew me a final kiss, and then disappeared.
I checked my inbox almost hourly in the first days after she’d left – I was so desperate to hear from her, and to learn that she was safe, and find out what she was doing, you know? But her first email arrived only after two long weeks, and it was a lengthy and pretty angry report on the appalling scenes of poverty she’d witnessed in Mumbai. She wrote about beggar children whose parents had mutilated them in horrific ways so that they would elicit more generous donations from tourists. She wrote about the thousands of people who slept under bridges and on sidewalks and who didn’t even own enough to cover their emaciated bodies with clothes or blankets. She wrote about the perverse contrast between the rich and the poor, and said it made her sick. She wrote that wherever she went she was pursued by a flock of ravenous, disease-ridden children who tore at her clothes and backpack, begging her for food and money. She wrote about the appalling attitudes to women she’d witnessed and the primitive sense of sexual entitlement of Indian men. There was nothing personal at all in her message, and my heart sank when I realized that it wasn’t even addressed to me directly but to a long list of friends and family to whom she had promised updates from her travels. Almost all of her subsequent emails from India were similar. I sent her long, regular emails about my own admittedly pretty uneventful and empty days, but only very rarely received a personal message in response. Usually, she told me that she hoped I was eating well and that she thought of me and that we were all terribly fortunate and owed the world some compensation for our privileges.
She ended up not following our carefully developed travel plan at all, and left Goa after just one week. She wrote that she had no interest in the drug and clubbing culture she encountered there, and that in fact she utterly despised it. Yoga, meditation and various other spiritual practices and doctrines people down there were interested in didn’t strike her as valid preoccupations either – she thought that the yogis and their mainly Western followers she visited were hypocrites, privileging the pseudo-enlightenment of a chosen few over the much more urgent task of redistributing wealth and establishing fairer economic conditions for the many. Or something like that. Her emails had become quite ranty in tone. She travelled through hundreds of small villages and visited numerous factories and farms on her way up north. She’d also inspected some sweatshops, and described in extremely graphic detail the conditions she saw there. Then she forbade everyone on her mailing list from buying textiles produced by a long catalogue of Western companies which she said mercilessly exploited Indian women and children. Every single one of my favourite brands was on that list. We could all tell that she’d become restless, and increasingly impatient to do something about all the horrors she was witnessing on her travels. In the end, she took up her work placement one month earlier than originally planned.
Once she was installed in Punjab, her messages to us became less and less frequent. The organization she was working for was helping local wheat and palm-oil farmers to secure fair-trade deals: I think they provided practical, financial and legal support, that kind of stuff. Julia wrote a few articles about the initiative that were published in various British newspapers. She spent a lot of time interviewing the villagers in the Pakistani border area about their daily plight and she uncovered some totally scandalous practices for which two very well-known Western
I checked my inbox almost hourly in the first days after she’d left – I was so desperate to hear from her, and to learn that she was safe, and find out what she was doing, you know? But her first email arrived only after two long weeks, and it was a lengthy and pretty angry report on the appalling scenes of poverty she’d witnessed in Mumbai. She wrote about beggar children whose parents had mutilated them in horrific ways so that they would elicit more generous donations from tourists. She wrote about the thousands of people who slept under bridges and on sidewalks and who didn’t even own enough to cover their emaciated bodies with clothes or blankets. She wrote about the perverse contrast between the rich and the poor, and said it made her sick. She wrote that wherever she went she was pursued by a flock of ravenous, disease-ridden children who tore at her clothes and backpack, begging her for food and money. She wrote about the appalling attitudes to women she’d witnessed and the primitive sense of sexual entitlement of Indian men. There was nothing personal at all in her message, and my heart sank when I realized that it wasn’t even addressed to me directly but to a long list of friends and family to whom she had promised updates from her travels. Almost all of her subsequent emails from India were similar. I sent her long, regular emails about my own admittedly pretty uneventful and empty days, but only very rarely received a personal message in response. Usually, she told me that she hoped I was eating well and that she thought of me and that we were all terribly fortunate and owed the world some compensation for our privileges.
She ended up not following our carefully developed travel plan at all, and left Goa after just one week. She wrote that she had no interest in the drug and clubbing culture she encountered there, and that in fact she utterly despised it. Yoga, meditation and various other spiritual practices and doctrines people down there were interested in didn’t strike her as valid preoccupations either – she thought that the yogis and their mainly Western followers she visited were hypocrites, privileging the pseudo-enlightenment of a chosen few over the much more urgent task of redistributing wealth and establishing fairer economic conditions for the many. Or something like that. Her emails had become quite ranty in tone. She travelled through hundreds of small villages and visited numerous factories and farms on her way up north. She’d also inspected some sweatshops, and described in extremely graphic detail the conditions she saw there. Then she forbade everyone on her mailing list from buying textiles produced by a long catalogue of Western companies which she said mercilessly exploited Indian women and children. Every single one of my favourite brands was on that list. We could all tell that she’d become restless, and increasingly impatient to do something about all the horrors she was witnessing on her travels. In the end, she took up her work placement one month earlier than originally planned.
Once she was installed in Punjab, her messages to us became less and less frequent. The organization she was working for was helping local wheat and palm-oil farmers to secure fair-trade deals: I think they provided practical, financial and legal support, that kind of stuff. Julia wrote a few articles about the initiative that were published in various British newspapers. She spent a lot of time interviewing the villagers in the Pakistani border area about their daily plight and she uncovered some totally scandalous practices for which two very well-known Western
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