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The return of an India-lover

Dennis Marcus Mathew

Amanda, in Alappuzha

ALAPPUZHA: Ailsa Walkiden, a nurse who first came to India by ship from Scotland to help World War prisoners, is preparing for yet another journey. This voyage will be different, though.

Ailsa’s ashes will be scattered over the Arabian Sea off Alappuzha, Kerala, on Sunday by her daughter Amanda, who arrived here on Thursday with husband Mark Streatfeild to fulfil her mother’s wishes.

“It was in my mother’s wish that her ashes be scattered as per Hindu tradition here in the ocean, so that she would always be travelling,” Ms. Amanda said as she and Mr. Streatfeild sat in a cottage of the very same resort Ailsa used to frequent during her annual Christmas-New Year visits to India over the last 25 years.

“She completed her nursing education from Glasgow and joined Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps to come to India in 1946 when she was 24. She was working in trains that brought prisoners of war from Burma, after which she moved around, visiting almost every Indian State.

She returned home after contracting tuberculosis,” says Ms. Amanda, who works with a school in Chiddingstone, Kent and also runs a bed & breakfast facility for travellers from their own 16th century farmhouse at Chested.

According to Ms. Amanda, Ailsa was enamoured by India, and a few years after her husband’s death in the late 1970s decided to return to India.

She came every year, mostly alone, to celebrate New Year. From 2000 onwards, Alappuzha was her winter station,” recalls Mr. Streatfeild, who works with a publishing firm.

Ignoring her failing health, Ailsa came here last in December 2005.

“After that trip, she realised that she could not travel anymore. Still, she wanted to die in India. But she breathed her last, aged 86, on May 13 in the U.K.,” says Ms. Amanda, who is in India for the first time.

“Mother never asked me to come with her, but used to tell us a lot about her fabulous life in India,” she adds.

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