Cheryl Braganza - My Gifted Friend

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I have been blogging about mid 1960s when I arrived in England after an arduous sometimes frightening hitch-hiking journey by road from India. One of the friendships of that era I remember and cherish was with the gifted poet and painter Cheryl Braganza at Onslow Gardens in South Kensington. I remember her as a petite and beautiful young lady with an exotic background. Born and brought up in Lahore in pre-independence India, her family owned a hotel opposite the railway station, appropriately called the Braganza Hotel. Cheryl studied in Rome, music in London and went on to Canada where she made a name for herself as a painter, motivated during her days in London after she met Francis Newton Souza, our recently-deceased Indian icon. We used to sit for hours in the local eatery serving fish fingers and tea and talked about writers we liked or hated. Cheryl reminds me that I introduced her to Sylvia Plath’s poetry and she commemorated that with a painting entitled 'Sylvia's Tulips' done in 1996. Here is a link to some of her paintings

http://www.picturetrail.com/cherylbraganza

and a further link to the McGill University International Women’s Day Newsletter where two of her more recent paintings are shown:

http://www.mcgill.ca/files/mcrtw/March07Newsletter.pdf

I would very much like to showcase some of her fine poems at my website at:

https://asiamajor.wordpress.com/reviews/

If she permits me I would like her to write about her recent brave struggle with serious illness and how she has overcome it with a fighter’s positive attitude.