It was symbolic of my time in college that debates – formal, civil, pointed exchanges of opinions – were common and popular. That was in the fifties when people still believed in talking and settling differences. It changed in the next two decades when you could not say a contrary word without being accused of petit bourgeois bias or knifed in a dark corner.
 
The main auditorium in the Presidency College had the depressing name, Physics Lecture Theater, but what transpired there was anything but depressing. The atmosphere was electric, the exchanges witty and the attacks cerebral and well-honed. No surprise the debates were well attended. That is an understatement: the hall was packed to the gills.
 
Students and professors came for a good reason. The debates were a great show. The themes were provocative, such as “Marxism is the opium of the people” and “Columbus went too far,” sure to draw ferocious exchanges on communism and the American way of life. Star power was not in short supply. Strangely, top-flight lawyers, eminent politicians, high court judges, party theoreticians, eloquent professors came to join the fray. Even skilled Oxford debaters turned up, courtesy of the British Council.
 
The beauty was that the stars mingled as equals with the hoi polloi, the ordinary students of the college. I was one of them. I had come from a perfectly ordinary middle-class family; my parents were decent, undistinguished people who did not own a house or a car. I knew I was rubbing shoulders with students whose parents were reputed lawyers, known scholars, government bigwigs, marquee politicians. It did not matter. If I could think on my feet and shoot from the hip, and make a point with vim and wit, I was as good as anyone. I could point a finger at a minister or judge and contradict him with civility doubtless but also with vigor and sarcasm. I felt like a crown prince.

​I knew that I would get as good as I gave and I would draw barbs as sharp as bullets. People would laugh at my expense, as they did at others’ expense. That too was a part of the learning experience: I learned how to take critiques, some fair and some less so. They taught me to change, to duck, to wriggle, to get over the occasional sting – and, of course, hit back.
 
Most of the strikes, though adversarial, were in good humor and the skill lay in dressing down an opponent by wrecking his logic or undermining his facts. The method to do that varied a lot. Bishnu Mukherjee, a doctor, did it by adopting a style of quiet reasonableness and belaboring a select point or two with gentle persuasion. In contrast, Naranaswamy Viswanathan was a suave actor and used histrionic flair to hammer home his points. Sudhansu Dasgupta, a rotund bureaucrat, easily put everybody else in shade by sheer exuberant logic chopping and word play. Listeners had so much fun that they forgot what his opponents said and always voted for him.
 
Compared to these stalwarts, I was young and earnest, and believed firmly in preparing thoroughly, arguing cogently and speaking passionately. I was astounded how receptive was my audience when I came up with a telling fact or a striking example. It reinforced my sunny belief that in general people are neither foolish nor closed to a new point of view.
 
The debates opened also a new vista, for Presidency College had no dearth of charming but sharp women who joined the fray and lent a welcome color to the events. I confess to a certain partiality for a willowy debater from a medical institution, who later sadly left debating for the world of potions and prescriptions.
 
The signature event every year was a debate between current students and past alumni. Miraculously, the college attracted famous people to come and be heckled by impudent young pupils. Admiration as much as amazement overwhelms me when I recall attacking with impunity in debates people like a Chief Minister of the state, later to attain cabinet rank in Delhi, and a high court judge, later to head the Supreme Court.
 
Apparently, traditions may take long to build but are easy to demolish. The halcyon days of debate and discussion ended swiftly when acrimony and violence overtook the safe, open airing of different views.
 
Years later I was invited to chair a debate in the college. It was in a plush but puny hall with barely thirty people in attendance. The debate was leaden and lackluster. I missed the fire and brimstone of the Presidency College that hadn’t yet become a staid university.

​Forty years ago, on an irresistible urge to capture a wintry dawn, I came out with a camera and sundry lenses and walked around a lake in the early hours. Then, as I came to a cluster of large trees, I saw something that gives me a shiver even to think about it after four decades. I saw a young man hanging from a branch, his head slightly stooped over a large knot in the rope that swung gently in the morning breeze.
 
I stood petrified for a few seconds, mechanically took a few shots and then felt a strange mixture of embarrassment, guilt and sheer horror. The sight haunted me for days. A life, a young life at that, had ended in abysmal despair. I was one of the many who had not raised a finger to stop that. I had not done anything.
 
Believe me, forty years is not enough to wipe a memory like that.
 
Especially not if the sequel is what followed.

A year back a young couple moved in as my neighbors with their two-year old son. They both worked, and their son went to a local nursery. Their home was right next to mine and our paths crossed often. Steve worked in a technology company and his wife Crystal taught in a neighborhood school. I often chatted with them, borrowed their lawn mower and attended their son’s birthday party.

Steve sometimes dropped in for an afternoon beer or an evening cocktail. He liked a gin-and-tonic and I was happy to provide one. He knew a lot about improving the visibility of a website and did it as a part of his job. I listened attentively to his ideas and tried to learn something. Steve also wanted to improve the community and its upkeep and suggested we improve our roads and maintain our trees. He was a quiet man and spoke softly, but had a piquant sense of humor and often surprised me with his witty takes on a neighbor’s driving style or new hairdo.​

​Once I asked him how his sly wit worked out in his work place. I wasn’t surprised to learn that his boss thought it a sign of his rebelliousness and even his colleagues deemed it a touch malicious. He said his image had somehow morphed early into that of a dissenter and whatever he suggested as an innovation was taken often as a critique of somebody or something. I realized how stressed had been his work life and wondered about the toll it took.
 
Since I travel often, I ask my neighbors to keep an eye on my home, especially if there is the prospect of cyclonic weather or heavy snow. In cold weather, I depended on Steve to occasionally start my car and keep the batteries alive. As I was leaving an early morning for South America for a long stretch, I placed my car keys in an envelope and dropped it in his mailbox.
 
Sitting in Colombia the next morning, I received his message assuring me that he would take care of the car and asking when I would return. I replied promptly and set out for a meeting. As I returned in the evening, there was a sudden cloudburst and a heavy shower unusual for Bogotá, and it seemed like the unsettling augury of a unkind event. And there it was, in black and white, on my computer.

​A message from a common friend said that, when Steve’s wife returned from work that evening, she did not see him in the living or dining room. She thought it was odd, because she had noticed his car in the garage. She hollered his name, in case he was tinkering with something in the basement. Her three-year old followed her train of thought and ran down the stairs to see what papa was doing.
 
The child found his father hanging from the rafters, a long leather cable round his neck and an upturned chair next to him.
 
A short hand-written note was nearby.
 
The first responders tried artificial respiration when they came, but they knew from the start that they had arrived too late to make a difference. The police came to investigate, following their unexceptionable rule of treating such a death as homicide until a suicide was proven. The note, along with Steve’s personal notes in his mobile phone, seemed the clinching evidence of his intent to end his life. Heartrendingly, the notes also showed how meticulously he had planned his exit: he had researched a method that was not too painful but quite certain of the outcome.
 
When the police left, so did Steve’s wife with her child. She could not bear to be in the house a moment longer. Nor did she want for the child any reminder of the ghastly scene he had burst upon by chance. They would stay in a hotel, before moving to another house one day.
 
The house is now empty, spruced and repainted, put up for sale. There is no lingering trace of the family that lived here for a year. Steve’s wife will struggle for months, perhaps years, coping with what cannot be ever be coped with. His child, one hopes, will one day grow into healthy adolescence and stop having nightmares. There was a memorial meeting for Steve; after that no acquaintance broaches the subject of his life or its bleak end. The police completed their dossier, satisfied that they knew what happened and how it happened.
 
I am the friend and neighbor, for whom the story has no end. What happened and why? What pushed a decent man I knew to the harsh edge of despair and beyond? What made a quiet, witty man place a noose around his neck, stare unblinking at an indecipherable void and step forward from a chair into the enveloping darkness? I will never know. And I will never stop wondering what I could have done to hold him back.

On one side of my living room, next to the large French window, is an old rocking chair. I love it. I don’t rock much, but I love to read the thick Sunday papers in the morning glimmer, sitting next to the window in that chair.
 
Sometimes visitors ask me where I got that chair, struck by its incongruous age in the company of my relatively new sofa set. I just say a friend gave it to me, no more. It has its own story though.

​The dentist had told me that my molars were causing problems and needed to be taken out. He referred me to a dental surgeon, who in turn set a date. I wanted to be his last appointment of the day, so that I could finish my work at the World Bank and still get the extraction done.
 
It was only when I arrived that the surgeon asked about an escort, because he said he would have to use general anesthesia, and somebody should guide me home. I had none, in a city I had just arrived. I said I would rather that, after the surgery, he asked his nurse to call a taxi to take me home. It was a Friday, and he seemed in a hurry to start his weekend. The moment I recovered, he came to say goodbye and left me in the care of his nurse.
 
The nurse was Clarissa, a youngish redhead. After finishing her chores and closing the office, she called a taxi. Then she found I was still in no condition to walk to the taxi. She lent me a shoulder, took me to the taxi and then had a second thought. She said, “You are in no shape to walk out to your home. I’ll take you to my apartment close by. You can rest an hour or two, and then go home in another taxi.”
 
I barely made it into her studio apartment before I collapsed. I remember hearing, “You better sleep it off” as she put me into a bed and pulled a blanket. I also have a fuzzy recollection of someone spooning vanilla ice cream in my mouth, murmuring, “The doctor said this will help soothe the pain.”
 
When I woke the next morning, the first thing I noticed was the hand on my chest. It was not mine and it had a silver bracelet. Then the angle of light from a window gave me the clearest clue that I was not in my bedroom. It was Clarissa’s. She had only a small loveseat in her tiny apartment and had been forced to share her bed with a stranger. It was the kindest thing she could do for a person in need.
 
I invited her for dinner the following weekend to thank her and we became friends.
 
When she married two years later, she introduced me to her husband, Donovan, and friends by saying, facetiously, that I was the one who slept with her, “without, even once, asking for (her) permission.” I responded lamely that I was “too high” to remember.
 
Donovan bought her the antique rocking chair for their wedding anniversary and, whenever I visited them, she invited me to sit there, for whatever she brought me to drink. I knew she loved the chair. I too liked it, its old-world oddity and its firm back and gentle swing. I liked it even more when Donovan said that she didn’t allow others to use it.
 
In their living room, the rocking chair occupied a place of honor for twenty years, though Donovan narrated with discomfiture that Clarissa always found a reason to steer guests away from the chair. They were allowed to admire it, but not sit on it.
 
When Donovan died of leukemia, Clarissa moved into an apartment in a retirement community, a smaller place that reminded me of her bachelor apartment. The rocking chair went there too, a symbolic placeholder for Donovan, she told me. I refrained from mentioning that she barely permitted him to occupy it.
 
Seven years later, Clarissa started losing her memory. She also had difficulty looking after her apartment. She moved into the assisted-living section of the community, where others looked after her. During the move, she told them to deliver the rocking chair to my address.
 
She said, laughingly, the next time I visited her, “I decided, just like you, not to ask permission.”
 
The antique rocking chair sits in my living room, rocking gently and supporting my back, as I sip coffee and read the Sunday papers. When I look at it, I think of Clarissa. It glows in the early light, a symbol of loyalty and kindness, understanding and enduring affection.

For about a month I have been sightless.
 
That is how I feel, but it is an overstatement. My right eye does not see, but my left eye works. It is the combination that is so discombobulating. I can’t clearly make out the edge of the sidewalk, or even the edge of the cup of tea in my hand.
 
I was sent home after eye surgery, for months of impatient recovery. The instructions were iron-clad. The first week keep your head down. Always, even when you sleep. Don’t take a shower. Eat light. Use eye drops day and night. Don’t lift any weight. Don’t move fast. In short, just sit and vegetate.
 
I can’t read. I can’t use computers. I can’t watch television. Since I can’t see, I can’t walk or drive. I live alone. The thought occurred: it is an ideal time to go on a fast, for I can’t even buy groceries. Maybe I will finally achieve the slender look I crave but cannot attain.
 
The bell rang.
 
My daughter has come, from the other end of the town, skipping office, to help me out. She has brought some strange contraptions: a folding mirror, which can let me watch television with my head down, and a donut-shaped cushion that will let me sleep with my face down.
 
An hour later the bell rang again.
 
My neighbor. “We heard of your surgery,” he said. “Here are some caramel poppers I made last night. Do try them. And let me know what you need. Milk, eggs, whatever.”
 
His wife said, “While I am here, I might as well start you on your eye drops.” She put the two drops in succession, then gently wiped the trickle from my face with a tissue.
 
Before I could ponder my misery the next morning, the bell rang impatiently yet again.
 
It was the attorney I had worked with in Honduras. She remains a friend and now lives in a distant suburb. I can barely make out the huge package she is carrying.

“Was told of the mishap,” she says breathlessly, “and decided to bring you seven dinners for the week.” Seven! I peer at the mountain she is struggling to insert in my refrigerator. She has also brought some blueberry-laden dessert and a pot of coffee and milk. So much for my futile ambition to achieve slim stardom.
 
Two days later, with barely a dent in my culinary wealth, turns up the young couple I befriended months ago, who live half a mile from my home.
 
“We are going grocery shopping, and thought we would take you with us, in case you need something.”
 
In the store they wouldn’t let me touch anything. All I had to do was to point, and they would pick up an item and place it in the trolley. On the way back, they stopped at Starbucks and got me the giant-sized macchiato they know I drink.
 
They seem to do a lot of grocery shopping, for on three successive occasions they have dropped two types of bread and three doses of macchiato.
 
Thursday. A card from my daughter: “Daddy, I hope you are doing all right. And your eye is getting better. Love you.”

Friday. An anxious call from my friend in Hong Kong: “Take all precaution. Don’t work too hard and exert your eye.”
 
Saturday morning. I have received ‘composed’ manuscripts from two publishers of my books that are about to be printed. I am mulling dejectedly how to revise those, when another neighbor’s nine-year-old daughter comes around with a plate.
 
“Mama made pancakes this morning. She thought you might like some.”

​Sunday afternoon. It is snowing. The flakes are coming down, slowly, beautifully, covering the ground, the bushes, the trees, even the leaves.

​The young couple’s car crunches on the snow outside my door. Astonishingly, even in this weather they are out shopping.
 
“We passed a Starbucks on the way back. Thought you might like a caramel macchiato.”
 
It is bitterly cold outside. But my heart is warm.

​When I see you again, I want you to take me in your arms.
 
I want you to forget the years that have separated us. And the silence that reared like a rampart between us.
 
I want you to take me, if you can, as the callow youth that came to know you, wanted to know more of you, and became hopelessly attached to you. I woke up every morning thinking of you, ran out in the first light of day to see how beautiful you were, watched every dusk slowly gather the tiniest drops of glimmer to unravel your darkest beauty and let me go to sleep with your mysterious, incandescent souvenir. Now I know I knew so little of you, but Heaven knows how obsessively I pursued you, how your strange aroma filled my heart, how you pervaded all my adolescent dreams.
 
Forgive me if I look different today. There are lines on my face and wrinkles on my hand. But you will recognize me yet. I still walk fast, and I still wear glasses. I still talk the same way. You must believe me when I say I still feel the same way.
 
I must be honest and admit that there have been a few other changes too. I have become a little more used to comfort. I am not running short of money all the time. I am a little healthier too. I don’t get stomach cramps any more. Maybe because I don’t drink the water you used to give me. Specialists have taken out some curious parasites from my entrails. Maybe they came from all that I ate from roadside vendors. I am quite well, thank you. I still run comfortably, though a trifle slowly.
 
You will be happy to know that I have two little girls. Not so little, really. They have grown up. They work, they are married. They cook, do laundry, party with friends. Occasionally they call their dad and fill his heart. They have not met you yet. I hope one day they get to know you and understand why you mean so much to me.
 
Yes, my life has changed a bit. You can’t take a man to the other end of the earth and expect no changes in his life. Some of my ways and habits have changed. But I have not changed. What really matters hasn’t changed one bit. I can feel it palpitating within me, in just the same way.
 
Otherwise, how do you explain this curious warmth I feel when I think of you? Like I am a kid again, falling in love, longing to see you, yearning to be near you, aching to hear the music of your voice? Why do I have to throw away the offer of a charming cruise or an exotic tour of Galapagos to rush every year to be with you? Why must I come, so compulsively, to your feet to know that I have done what I cannot do without?

You have changed too. You aren’t as young as when I first met you. You look different, so different that I sometimes feel I don’t have my bearing with you. I feel lost, even when I am in a place with you where I have been a thousand times. A thousand admirers have changed you, a million adorations of architects and engineers have made a difference to your looks. You have taken on a series of cosmetic changes that sometimes please me, sometimes exasperate me, but never fail to intrigue me. Age will never wither you, nor my distance fade your infinite variety.
 
What is this magical spell you hold over me, through years and decades? Not I alone, I know others who are as servile as me in their inept effort to be free of your wiles? To all of us, nothing compares with you. Other may be better, more congenial or more talented, but we want you. Our ambitions, our search for comfort or convenience, may take us elsewhere, but you haunt our dreams, run in our veins and, through winter and spring and summer, rule our passion.
 
For me, I have wandered far and wide, but in my loneliest hour and jauntiest moment, I think of you. I turn to you in my mind for respite and reassurance. And the absurd hope of recovering a fragment of my passion. I am no longer naïve enough to think of my youth as the peak of my life; nor do I think of my mature days as the start of an inglorious fadeout. My heart still beats, and I live a life resonant with effort and meaning. I flatter myself I have a clearer view of what matters, at least in my life.

​That is why, Kolkata, after an entire year, I am again at your door, knocking on a portal of my undying imagination and stubborn anticipation. I will never stop thinking of you and never stop hoping that I will pick up all the lost threads of my youth and memory, my flippant dreams and futile desires, my fanciful hopes and foolish heartbreaks. I am here to see your face. I am here to melt in awe.
 
You may stand indifferent, caring little for a legion of supplicants, and go your capricious way: let pedestrians stumble on ruined sidewalks, cars choke in narrow lanes and traffic gridlocks, patients wait interminably for medical relief, the old cough in buildings as frail as their bodies, day laborers trudge across and under bridges about to collapse, saffron fanatics and pious hacks coerce ‘donations,’ and children’s eyes blur and lungs blacken with grimy air. You will draw me still, irresistibly. Forever.
 
When Shakespeare makes Maecenas say of Cleopatra that Mark Antony “must leave her utterly,” we know he is right, for he should run from the fatal attraction of the enchantress. But we also know that Enobarbus is right when he replies, “Never, he will not.” The reason? “Other women cloy appetites they feed.” But, Kolkata, like Cleopatra, “makes hungry where most she satisfies.” 

​‘Everything beautiful is made for the eye of one who sees.’ Rumi
 
My plan was to visit India this winter, something I longed to do. My heart soared; but my plan plummeted.
 
A classic metaphor about optimism and pessimism is that a pessimist looks at a glass of wine as half-empty and an optimist sees it as half-full. Another version is that the pessimist sees the goblet and dreads the moment it will be empty, the last drop of wine gone; the optimist trusts the goblet will be refilled, probably with better wine. I was anticipating some leisurely hours on the plane, when I could calmly view the goblet the airlines passed me and the wine they served.
 
Shaw said an optimist invented the plane and a pessimist devised the parachute. Well, the optimist in me bought the ticket for India and the pessimist in me went for a last-minute medical check. Turned out the retina in my right eye was misbehaving badly. I needed an urgent surgery.
 
When the bandage came off, I saw nothing with my right eye. I was like the Greek mythical creature Cyclops, whose very name meant ‘round-eyed,’ just one eye. The difference was that a Cyclops had a powerful beam from its only eye, while mine was the same myopic, astigmatic, bespectacled eye. 

This caused some hilarious problems. The first was that I replicated a wine-sodden toper when I walked. Like the normal two-eyed person, I had no idea what monocular vision does to your gait. I had no sense of depth and I had no sense of balance. When we see with two eyes, because the eyes are in different sites they offer a three-dimensional picture of things. The picture changes radically with one eye. The steps on the staircase of my three-story house became hard to discern. I misjudged the door of my bedroom and bumped into it like a clumsy tippler. I poured water from a jug into a glass inches from my face and poured it actually outside the glass – on the table.
 
Nor could I walk with a confident stride. The balance that has been instinctive with me since I learned to walk holding my mother’s hand seemed to have suddenly abandoned me. The familiar garden path, the simple alley in front of my home all turned uncertain and wobbly. I walked a small distance with caution and without joy. The fun of a leisurely, carefree walk had made way for the shambling stagger of a dipsomaniac. I am told doctors have a daunting name for this, stereopsis, and they allow as much as a year for people to adapt to it if they lose an eye in an accident.
 
As the days passed, my dysfunctional eye began to see more than just black and dark-gray shadows. I seemed to perceive broad shapes and some colors. Slowly, with more days the shapes began to gain definition and the colors turned brighter. At the end of two weeks I finally and vaguely started making out objects.
 
I felt encouraged by what seemed an improvement of vision in my right eye. But now I had a new problem. As long the affected eye was shut or had practically no vision, my left eye did all the work. I could, for example, read a label or turn a door knob. Now that my right eye had started seeing things, though very poorly, my brain reverted to taking the inputs from both eyes as equally valid and processing them together. The result was utter confusion. I was not sure what I was seeing. Everything seemed like a confusing collage, of something clear and something seen through a jelly-smeared lens. To read even the largest sign, I had to put up a hand and block my right eye and let the left eye do its unhampered work.

​Of course, I would like to regain my normal vision. I read that over 90 per cent of people who undergo vitrectomy recover their sight. The small print says that the vast majority of them do not retrieve their full vision. That disconcerts me little. I have worn glasses since I was ten, when I first stumbled to adjust to bodily imperfection. I have long shed the illusion I was perfect in anything.
 
In a month, or more, the gas bubble the surgeon has inserted in my eye will slowly dissipate, and I will stop being Cyclops and see again with both eyes. I will walk comfortably and confidently again. I will see the blue sky and silver clouds. I will read and, hopefully, I will write.
 
The pessimist will say I have had a nasty experience. The cornered but resolute optimist in me keeps reminding that I will visit India again.