​Last week, after many years, I dreamed of a horse. To be sure, it was a white horse.
 
The last time I had touched a horse was when my kid daughter was learning to ride in Haiti twenty years ago. My memory had leapfrogged over that recollection and hurtled into a past, much further.
 
My mother came from a large family and three of her brothers were doctors. My favorite was a balding, bespectacled man of middle height and professorial mien. He had a large house, named lovingly after his mother, in downtown Bhagalpur, in eastern India, where lived his wife and children.
 
He spent much of the week, across the river, in a small town called Bihpur, where he had a pleasant ranch-type house with a large orchard and an extensive hospital next to it. His aging mother presided over the house with the able assistance of a mayordomo, Aziz, who was also a capable chef. The hospital was the responsibility of Munshiji, a corpulent mustachioed man, who also acted as the chief pharmacist and was officially called the Compounder.
 
During summer, while father toiled in the city, mother and I took a vacation with her brother’s family. I loved my aunt, a sweet even-tempered woman, and I enjoyed my high-spirited cousins. Together we went to markets, movies and parks and I had fun. But nothing could hold me in the city. My heart longed for my uncle, his ranch and his hospital across the river. At the first opportunity, I left my mother in the city and took a ferry boat across to Bihpur.

​Bihpur was no more than a tiny village, which found a spot on India’s map only because it had a railway station to transport sandstones and limestones from nearby quarries to the cities. Besides that, it had only a small elementary school, a tiny fishery and a few scattered houses, and farm houses in the fields beyond.
 
Grandma was old and feeble, and seldom moved far beyond her room. Since uncle was mostly at the hospital, I felt like the master of the house. I wandered about the rooms and uncovered their secrets. I explored the room in which special medicines were stocked; the smell made me think of exotic diseases and mysterious medicines. I liked the room where uncle kept old magazines; there were endless stacks of Life, Readers Digest and National Geographic, not to speak of medical journals. A covered verandah ran around the house, with long comfortable library chairs. I felt like royalty as I occupied one with a couple of my books or uncle’s magazines and waited for Aziz to bring me a cup of tea.
 
My kingdom extended beyond the house, for I could just put on my boots and saunter into the orchard. It had an unkempt look, with all the bamboos at the edges and the cluster of mango trees at the center. It was large enough to get lost in and yet not large enough to stay lost for ever. I loved walking in the utter silence of the groves, hearing only my footfall, smelling the smells I never smelled in the city and watching the colorful birds whose names I did not know.
 
When I tired of solitude, I just walked over to the hospital. It was always buzzing, with thirty to fifty people. It would not occur to anyone in the village to let somebody go to the hospital alone. Yet it was a remarkably quiet place, for the villagers clearly believed that the doctor should have the peace to do his work well. I often sat unobtrusively in the waiting area, listening to patients talking of their respective pains and problems and watching the children playing together despite their bandages and crutches. Sometimes I sat with Munshiji, see him prepare the red cough mixture and pour it in a bottle marked on the side with the requisite dosage. He would let me prepare the yellow ointment that seemed in great demand and ask me to distribute it into small containers in the right quantity.

​Uncle worked in a corner room, talking to patients, sometimes to their parents or siblings to get the full story, then examine them carefully, and patiently explain what needed to be done and how to take the prescribed medicine. He had the strange tic of adjusting his glasses with his left hand while he wrote the prescription with the right, often pausing, with the pen in mid-air, to ponder whether he should add another medicine. When there was a short interval between patients, he would notice me and ask me to come in and talk with him. He never asked me if I was bored – he instinctively knew I was not – but would sometimes introduce me to a villager and ask me talk with him further, about what was new in the school or the railway station.
 
The biggest adventure was when there was an emergency in another village and uncle had to rush there. Often he combined the occasion with his visit to patients in adjacent villages who needed his attention. There were no proper roads, only mud tracks. Uncle would go on horseback, accompanied by the compounder or an assistant. He had three horses for the purpose, one being the spare. Munshiji, being the heaviest, got the big brown horse; uncle rode the black one, because I – coming along for the outing – had told him that I fancied the white horse.

​I loved that horse. He was handsome, especially with a brown patch near his neck. I also imagined he was brave and intelligent. The greatest sign of his acumen was that he took to me easily. He even seemed to nod as I spoke to him when others weren’t there. I thought, with scant evidence, that he loved me as much as I was enamored of him. It was possible that the baby carrots I had stolen from grandma’s kitchen to feed him had made him slightly partial to me. Despite my limited riding skills, mostly acquired under Munshiji’s brief tutelage, at least he never shook me off and appeared to follow my instructions. I rode to the villages happily, with a touch of pride.
 
The poor villagers received my uncle like an angel, Heaven-sent, and I shone in reflected glory. Uncle was a simple, earnest man, who never accepted gifts or favors from patients. So the villagers insisted on my drinking a cup of tea with them. At first I disliked the tea, because it was made with smoked milk (the only way they knew to preserve the milk), but as I kept drinking their tea, eventually I began to like the smoked taste. Later, when I returned home, I missed it and told my mother that her tea wasn’t as good as what I had with my uncle.
 
When I finally returned to my city home and was asked about the vacation, I could not say enough of my uncle’s saintly conduct with the villagers. However, I never forgot to mention my triumphant journey on a white horse.

​Tall, well-coiffed, elegantly dressed, she looked what she was: the senior vice president of Washington’s second largest and most powerful industrial association. I had been referred to her by a university dean who had read my writings and liked my speech in a conference.
 
It was my first month in the US and I was trying to jump-start my career in a new land. I had been to several interviews, but the moment the interviewers realized that I was a newcomer to the country and had no US experience, I was politely shown the door.
 
Esther was very correct but very different. She asked hard questions, followed up with harder ones, but they were all substantive ones, to check my professional timbre not my personal tint. I also felt, though I was not certain, a quiet geniality behind the cultivated impersonality, as if she didn’t want her kindness to show. I felt comfortable with her.
 
She called the following day. I had the assignment.
 
I found quickly it was a tough assignment. The reason was the work had been started before, on the wrong foot. Esther’s young assistant, Dana, had begun the work with a questionnaire that was poorly conceived and ineptly worded, and, since it was on the delicate subject of their compensation, it was likely to have created misgivings among senior executives. We had to overcome this initial handicap before we could proceed.

We struggled and slowly made headway, principally by seeking meetings with departmental heads. I succeeded in reassuring them that their existing benefits were not in question at all; our study intended to improve other aspects including tax liability.
 
All through the exercise, I kept Esther informed, as she preferred, and she kept an eye on my progress. I felt we had build a rapport. More, I sensed an imperceptible thread of sympathy and support – a well-guarded inclination to help – and I was grateful.
 
Three weeks later Esther invited several of her staff for dinner. Next to me sat Wilhelm, Esther’s husband. He looked twenty years older than Esther, a lean, old, exhausted man who seemed lost in his chair. He spoke with such a heavy teutonic accent that I thought he was speaking another language. Then I realized that his English was very limited: after overcoming the barrier of his accent, you had to cross the bigger bar of his Kindargarten English. I have had the advantage, however, of listening and deciphering the English of non-English speakers in ten countries. I let my ears get accustomed to his tempo, and soon I could make out parts of his conversation and respond appropriately.
After the other guests had left, Esther asked me to stay back, poured me a brandy and sat next to me. She thanked me for talking patiently with Wilhelm and said that most people gave up after the first five minutes.
 
Then she told me how she had met Wilhelm. She was a senior army officer during the Second World War and at its conclusion posted in Berlin. Soviet troops had captured Wilhelm in the eastern sector, where he had gone for work, and, ignoring his plea that he was a qualified engineer, put him to work in a mine. His asthma turned acute, he worked frantically, but did not meet quotas. He was beaten, sometimes mercilessly, for his poor performance. Finally, realizing that he was useless for the purpose, the Russians handed him over to the US Army and he appeared before Esther.

She took pity on the withered, cowering man and arranged for his care in the American hospital. She visited him at first occasionally, then regularly, and eventually became attached to him. Nine months later, when the order came for her to return to the US base, she hesitated and then went through a brief ceremony with the army pastor that made Wilhelm her husband. She said she wasn’t sure at all that she was doing the right thing, but she could not abandon him and marrying him was the only way she could think of bringing him with her to the US.

​In the US Wilhelm continued to have recurring nightmares and indifferent health. He found it very hard to learn English and he simply could not follow everyday conversation. Wilhelm had worked for two major engineering firms in Germany, but he could not get even temporary jobs in Washington. Esther, who cared for him now more than ever, had meanwhile been demobilized and she quickly got an important job in an industrial association. On her reference, several companies agreed to interview Wilhelm, but not a single job materialized. His limited English was certainly a handicap. But Esther soon realized there was a bigger problem. The war had just ended, and feelings in the US were still very raw about the Germans, especially with the daily trickle of news about the holocaust.
 
Twenty years had gone by. I could still hear the trace of bitterness in Esther’s voice as she narrated how, week after week, Wilhelm persisted in looking up jobs in the newspapers but seldom got even a call for interviews. Any interview he went to, he felt nobody wanted to see his papers or hear his background. He was let go after a short, perfunctory chat. Esther sought the help of friends, but even they were less than enthusiastic. As Esther’s career soared in two decades, Wilhelm’s never even started. She went to work each day and returned to find Wilhelm dejected at home. Esther said with a melancholy smile that the caregiving role she had assumed in Berlin seemed to have lasted a lifetime.
 
I was sad for them both. But I also had an epiphany.
 
All these weeks, working for Esther, I had felt a nurturing superior’s subtle but steady backing. Now I knew why, facing an immigrant trying to find his feet in an alien land, she had felt instinctively she had to be supportive.

It was my brother’s wedding reception, but I knew few of the guests. Lots of politicos and doctors, since the bride’s grandfather was a well-known doctor-politician, but no familiar face. Searching for one, I saw something notable. A woman in a golden outfit, so beautiful she looked like a model. She wore a sari, but she didn’t look quite Indian. She looked resplendent.
 
Luckily there was an empty seat next to her.
 
“I am the groom’s brother. Are you in the bride’s party?”
 
“I am the bride’s aunt.”
 
“Then I ought to know you better.”
 
“You may,” she said with a decorous smile.
 
She had indeed been a model in Paris and a broadcaster in Washington, but now on a long vacation in India. Her looks were easily explained: while her father was an Indian journalist with Reuters, her mother was Russian, now a Canadian citizen.
 
After dinner, I commented that, like me, she didn’t seem to know many people in the party.
 
“I don’t. I have been overseas much of my life. I don’t know many in this town. I am not close to my family either. They think me strange. By Indian standards, I suppose I am ornery.”
 
“Help me understand. Give me an example.”
 
“Here is one. I have had enough of this party. Why don’t we go somewhere quiet and talk?”
 
“I can take you to a bar or a restaurant, but I doubt it will be quiet on a Saturday night. The other option is close by and convenient, but I hesitate to suggest: my home.”
 
I had some good Cognac and made two Sidecars.
 
She looked suspiciously at her glass and asked, “What is this concoction? Are you trying to get me drunk?”
 
“I might, if you weren’t so pretty and interesting as you are. I am just trying to make you comfortable.” I explained the cocktail.
 
I said, “The reason I want you to be comfortable is I want to ask you something rather strange.”

​“Fifteen years ago,” I continued, “I was a student and visited my aunt in central India. She had a large stack of old editions of a popular magazine, and I would sometimes leaf through them. One day I saw a photo of a famous dancer, who was also a famous beauty, in Trafalgar Square in London, feeding pigeons. She was a beauty all right, but what caught my attention was that standing right next to her was another woman who, I thought, was not only more beautiful, but captivating.
 
“I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I didn’t know who she was; I didn’t even know her name, for the caption only mentioned the famous dancer. I tried to find out more, but had no luck. It was perhaps a silly obsession, but I never forgot that face. Today, as I sat next to you in the wedding reception and kept looking at your face, that old photo came to mind.
 
“So, tell me, have you ever fed pigeons at the Trafalgar Square?”
 
She looked at me for a long time, then quietly said, “The dancer is my uncle’s wife. She stayed with me in London.”
 
She was captivating in more ways than one. I have never met anyone in whom two cultures not only coexisted so visibly but conflicted so frequently and abrasively. She could wake up loving Kolkata, but by breakfast loathe it with passion. She missed the Washington ambience at lunch – “I like the endless choice of healthy, delicious salads” – only to recall over dinner the churlish way she was once pawed there. She would speak nostalgically of her apartments in Paris and Washington, and at other times speak of the pain to keep them in trim without domestics to help.
 
She spoke with an adroit melange of English, Bengali and Arabic that occasionally bemused me, but always amused. The writer, Syed Mujtaba Ali, who knew all the three idioms as well as her, once described her beauty as a golden trap, comparable to the dazzling deer that misled the heroine of Ramayana: you regretted if you succumbed, but you regretted even more if you did not and missed the rapture of a lifetime.
 
We were together for three years, before she returned to Washington. When I arrived in Washington seven years later, I found she had changed her mind and returned to India to live there. For ever, she told me. It took me some effort not to express a doubt.

My ​father’s friend, Dr Roy Chowdhury, a well-known scholar and writer, was traveling in a train and reading a book. A young boy, standing on the bridge in a railway station, playfully threw a stone as the train moved out. The stone went through the window, crashed his glasses and struck his left eye along with glass splinters. He went to a hospital.
 
When he came to our home several weeks later, my parents were aghast to see his face, an eyepatch under his new glasses. My mother nearly spilt the tea she was bringing for him. My father, greatly pained, exclaimed, “How could the boy do this to you?”
 
Dr Roy Chowdhury was remarkably calm and reconciled. He said, “The boy did what he did. Now I have to keep doing what I have always done.”
 
He simply took the tea from my mother’s hand and sat in the corner chair he preferred. When he saw me standing mutely next to his chair, clearly distressed, he just spread out his hand and took mine.
 
This happened decades earlier, but I can still see the scene vividly in my mind.

A ​middle-sized light-boned man, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Dr Roy Chowdhury moved spryly and spoke in a quiet, deliberate voice. He wrote solemn books on literary figures, analyzing their social context and message. Mildness was his style; he did not speak a bellicose word or even laugh boisterously. When he placed his tea cup on the saucer, you would not hear a sound.
 
His wife had passed away six years ago, leaving Dr Roy Chowdhury feeling helpless as a child. Though much younger than him – she had been his student – she ran his home for him, leaving him free for his esoteric quest. She died shortly after their two sons had left home to study engineering. They cared little for literature or their father’s abstruse studies. Dr Roy Chowdhury had reorganized his life, minimized his possessions and placed all non-academic chores in the hands of a trusted domestic. He was, in short, quite alone.
 
If he felt lonely, he didn’t say it. He devoted himself more energetically to his work. Years later I went back to his books and tried to read them as a key to him rather than his subjects. They were clearly the result of hard work, precisely written and meticulously documented. Singularly lacking in stirring insights, they carefully analyzed the material and offered carefully worded conclusions. I was not impressed but I understood.
 
He was telling us, in effect, that he had found somebody worthy and delved into his or her books to find what really they were worth. He was doing no more than leaving landmarks for others to explore and come to their own conclusions.

He ​went through a number of surgeries to try to restore vision to his left eye. Those were long and painful, but Dr Roy Chowdhury went through those quietly and patiently. When at the end, he lost all vision in the left eye, he taught himself to work only with his right eye and determinedly went on with his work.
 
The next time I remember him visiting our home was when he presented his new book to my mother, “in poor exchange,” he said, “for the superb meals” she had served him. I knew the meals to have been modest, and there really had been only a few of them, but his gracious exaggeration pleased me and mother’s face was radiant.
 
There was no encore, for Dr Roy Chowdhury passed away eight months later. He had, however, managed to complete his last book, except the end notes and indices he loved to painstakingly check and re-check, to avert the slightest lapse from accuracy. There was even a handwritten memorandum of the points he wanted the publisher to observe while printing, proofing and binding the book.
 
The last point was that a certain employee, whose competence Dr Roy Chowdhury trusted, should be asked to proof the manuscript. He explained that, unlike on previous occasions, he could not proof it himself as his eye, quite singular, was feeling some fatigue. That was the only reference to his accident anyone could recall.

J​im, my colleague at a US Embassy in Central America, was the toughest consular officer when it came to granting visas to local citizens. Their pleas to visit relatives or to study in an American college, he told the other officers, were spurious: all these “brown people” really wanted was to get into the US and stay there to make money.
 
Jim enjoyed his reputation as a difficult officer to get by, and he reveled in rejecting the majority of the applicants he interviewed. Over coffee he would recount how he had uncovered their scams and saved our country from intruders. Once, he told me of the local surgeon who had fed him an unconvincing story of wanting to travel to the US to learn a new surgical procedure. What he really wanted, Jim said, was to earn an American surgeon’s large salary. He had denied the man a visa.

O​ne night the next week Jim’s three year old son developed a respiratory problem. By morning he was in a critical state. The nurse practitioner at the embassy’s medical center began calling local doctors, who suggested that the child be taken to a nearby teaching hospital, where a surgeon had treated similar cases. Desperate, Jim and his wife rushed their son to the hospital. The specialist was the young surgeon Jim had denied a visa the previous week. The hurried surgery was a success, and Jim was able to take his son home after a few days.
 
A week after the surgery, Jim reversed his decision to deny the surgeon a visa.
 
He also stopped narrating his endless bitter stories of scams uncovered, which was a great personal relief to me.

​She had fallen from a height of thirty feet and died, said the initial report. The first part was correct, the second part wasn’t. It was my year as the US Consul in Kathmandu. As a critically injured American overseas, traveling alone, she was my responsibility.
 
I took a large utility vehicle and drove pellmell to the Teaching Hospital’s emergency ward. Judy was in a bad shape. She had fallen, thanks to a broken railing, from the third floor of her hotel. One leg and hip had been badly injured, and she had contusion in her head, with a seriously inflamed eye. Doctors had given her painkillers, but could not proceed further without xrays. The hospital’s machine wasn’t working.
 
The only other local hospital that had one was closed for the day. I drove there, with Judy stretched out on the backseat. I speak Nepali and in fifteen minutes I had found out where the man in charge of xray section lived. I knocked on his door.
 
He was drinking tea with his wife. He came out with a cup in hand.
 
“I want to show you something,” I said, “please come with me.” Nonplussed, he followed.
 
I took him to the car, pointed to the woman inside. “She is only 25, her whole life ahead of her. She will die or become a cripple, unless you help me. Please help me with a xray.”
 
“But I need two other people to run the machine!”
 
“You have me. I will get another person. We will do whatever you ask us to do.”
 
I got another person from the street by paying cash and we had the xray report.

​We returned to Teaching Hospital, got two doctors and started the long process of treatment. Judy had no medical insurance and scant cash. For the hospital, the Consulate was some guarantee. I persuaded the two specialists not to charge for the moment. But the nurses had to be paid. I filled up a form, put Judy’s thumbprint as she was in no condition to sign, and took out a loan from the US Government.
 
The hospital director mentioned that a famous US neurosurgeon would visit Nepal shortly. I called him brazenly in Kentucky and invited him for dinner. I picked him at the airport, took him home for a late supper and told him frankly I needed his advice on Judy. He surprised me by saying, “Let’s do it.” It was around midnight and we got in by pretending there was an emergency. The surgeon saw Judy, went through her medical dossier and prepared a detailed strategy for two months.
 
The next day, while in a formal meeting, the Prime Minister privately asked me about Judy, for her case had featured in the newspaper. When I said that the surgeon had suggested that Judy’s optical nerve had sustained some damage, he said he would ask his nephew, the best eye specialist in the country, to check on her. He came next day, along with his wife, a gynecologist, and they both examined Judy and suggested a course of treatment. When I broached the subject of a fee, they said his uncle had specifically forbade him to accept any.
 
Judy had a respiratory problem and needed an inhaler. We didn’t find one in Kathmandu. I worried and fretted and then had an idea. It was the height of the tourist season, and, when I drove to the international airport, I found the departure lounge full. I had taken the airport manager’s permission and stood on a stool near the exit door. I had everybody’s attention when I said that the tourists could return to their countries and buy inhalers again, but a young woman desperately needed one and I would be grateful if anybody was prepared to spare one. I had three!
 
The money situation was getting acute. I spoke in two local churches and quickly raised a collection. This led a young businessman to organize a fundraising dinner at his hotel and help me with a sizable check.

​After two months of painful treatment, Judy was in a condition to return home to the US for further therapy. I persuaded Lufthansa to give her the gift of a first-class seat. With permission from the airport authorities, I drove Judy, ensconced in her wheelchair, right next to the plane. Then an airlines official, an ex wrestler and a mountain of a man, simply picked her up like a doll and took her up to her seat. Judy, partly recovered and still in pain, would at least be with her family. I wished she could walk again.
 
Eight months later I was in the US and in Colorado for a vacation. I said to my host I wondered how Judy, a Colorado girl, was progressing, since he was one of the persons who had contributed to the collection for Judy’s treatment. He said he would try to find out.
 
Early the next day I was sitting in the portico, sipping coffee and watching a glorious Colorado morning emerge, when a car drove in and the door flung open. A beautiful young woman came out, strode to where I sat, and said laughingly, “Watch!” Then she jumped three times, to show that she could do it.
 
Judy looked splendid. She could now, not just walk, jump.
 
If she hadn’t hugged me then, I would have been embarrassingly teary-eyed and tongue-tied. 

“When do I see you again?”
“I am not quite sure.”
“Have you completed the papers the consulate has sent you.”
“I will get around to those this week.”
“Please do. Those are essential for the visa.”
 
I had been busy and my life seemed full. I had a demanding corporate job, managed a non-profit in the evening and taught part-time in the university. Also, I edited a literary journal, wrote columns for a professional magazine and did serious photography. I rowed early morning and partied late evening.

In walked an intruder, least expected. She spoke softly and smiled often. Her boss, a close friend, wanted me to help her with a project she was supervising. We worked together but soon found each other more interesting than the work. My work and my writing went on the back burner and the parties began to seem lack-luster. I longed to be with her.
 
The next eighteen months, carefree and joyous, passed quickly. The fresh-faced, gentle-eyed woman, who had walked so unceremoniously into my life, was now to leave it just as unceremoniously. Her project was nearly done; the deadline for her overseas report was approaching fast, in a far-off US university; her parents in Minnesota wanted her back for Christmas. Disconcertingly, definitively, a friendly police officer told me her visa, extended twice already, would not have a period of grace.
 
“Would you like to come with me to the US, for a short visit?”
“But your parents want you with them.”
“You could come with me.”
“Don’t you have your project report to finish?”
“All right, all right.”
 
I couldn’t get any leave at the time, in any case. Off she went, alone, back to the US, her parents and her university.
 
She quickly submitted an application for a visa for me. The local consulate sent me the papers. It was a complicated affair and I shrank from the task. She persisted and called me to urge completion.
 
Then she went a step further. She went to her Senator, who chaired the committee dealing with immigration. The next thing I knew I had a call from the US Consul, “Please come and see me tomorrow.” The forms were done in ten minutes. The Consul waived the requirement for documents I didn’t have. The visa arrived in a week.
 
Now began a frantic race against the clock. I had to persuade my company to let me go, without the required notice. The non-profit organization I had painstakingly built had to be left with a friend. There was no time to sell my home; I just handed the key to my brother and the furniture to people who wanted them, at a price or at no price. My books went to a library, my clothes to a charity, my music collection to friends. I did not close the bank account, for the prevailing exchange control meant I couldn’t exchange my rupees for dollars.
 
“When do you leave?”
“I don’t know yet. Trying to get some dollars.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just come, please.”
“I don’t want to arrive and panhandle!”
“You won’t have to. Come quickly.”
 
My parents came to see me off at the airport. They waved from a balcony as I treaded the tarmac to board the plane. I was leaving the place I knew, the people I loved, for a distant land and unknown future. I did not have the reassurance of a promised job or even a padded wallet.
 
The aircraft was crowded, the flight painfully long. My short seatmate sat sullenly and drank wordlessly. That left me alone with my uncertain thoughts.
 
The plane stopped at Dulles International Airport with a sharp jolt. A warm, sultry July afternoon greeted us. I jostled ahead with a motley crowd of summer tourists, getting into lines, going up and down stairs, riding on escalators, showing papers, answering questions, and finally entering the lounge. Around me people were greeting people, talking, laughing, hugging. My sullen seatmate, smiling broadly, held the hand of a little boy.
 
Amid the hubbub, I stood aside, tired, lost, expectant.

And, then, there was a sudden swirl of long blonde hair, a familiar flash of glimmering blue eyes, a dizzy blur of the world’s sweetest sounds, smells and sensations. Next moment, the bright overhead lights of the airport were going round and round, as were a pair of slender arms around my neck.
 
Found! I was no longer tired or lost: I was home.

​I know I am a blabbermouth. I speak too long, use too many words. When I write, I try to be disciplined; even then, when I take a second look, I take out words rather than adding them.
 
How did this happen to a shy, tongue-tied Mama’s Boy? How I loved to be under my mother’s wings when other boys teased me or tough teachers intimidated me. She was a gentle soft-spoken person, but would unsheath some steel if she felt anyone dared bully me. My father went the other way and quietly enticed me to read poems aloud to him and his friends. He wanted me to be expressive. I finally listened when he persuaded me to speak in school debates.

My parents did something right, for in the college I joined politics, lectured and debated, wrote pieces for the wallpaper, read papers and argued in seminars. I grew to be known as an articulate person. It makes me recall a sardonic remark from my brother, a psychologist, “There are two classes of people, those who write and speak, and those who think, and the two classes are exclusive.”
 
Some such thought may have induced me to speak with Satya Narayan Goenka. He was an Indian who had grown up in Burma and become a successful businessman, then met a senior bureaucrat U Ba Thin who introduced him to Buddhism, and, after a long, earnest internship, become an evangelist for meditation. He cared little for formal religion or its rites. He saw meditation as a practical tool to exorcise suffering, achieve focus and develop compasssion. That, to him, was Dhamma, the way to liberation.
 
Goenka, then seventy, had started 300 meditation centers in 100 countries and taught a thousand trainers to teach meditation. He had experimented with hardened criminals in US and Indian prisons, instructing them to meditate. He had plans for the small Asian country where I was serving as a diplomat and invited me to join a session.
 
The ‘session’ meant a commitment of ten days, with an evening ahead for preparation and a morning at the end for recapitulation. From the moment I signed in, without any charge, I had to maintain complete silence and say not a word at any time. I had modest, free lodging and decent, free meals, with a hundred others. Our only responsibility was to listen to brief talks and meditate all the time. A UN colleague, whose long legs went to sleep the moment she assumed the lotus position, called it the Benighted Buddhist Boot Camp.

​We were up at five in the morning and, after a quick shower and a simple repast, on our prayer mats by seven. The discourses were mercifully short and unexpectedly down-to-earth. Clearly the long hours of silent meditation were the centerpiece, the talks the mere annotation. When my mind wandered, guiltily I meditated the harder.
 
On the seventh day – when reportedly even God relented and rested – late in the evening I was taking a stroll after the day’s labor, when I felt a jab in my lower ribs. I turned to face a Venezuelan friend, who had apparently been trying to draw my attention with hand signals, since any oral effort was verboten. Failing in that, she had simply run up and jabbed a finger. I had no idea she was attending the program and was pleased to see her. I hugged her and, perhaps overwhelmed by the discovery, she impulsively kissed me.
 
That was the only interruption of our rigorous routine. As I was leaving on the last morning, I looked at the other faces and saw a curious change. We all had a chastened, earnest, sedate look. Inside, I was both tired and excited: tired of grappling with the thoughts that assail you when you suspend your immediate concerns, excited because you feel sure that you can go beyond those thoughts and have a new perspective on your life. Suddenly all your key problems seem a little vapid and petty.
 
The very silence was a spectacular experience, the very void where new ideas can emerge. The Buddhists have a saying: It is the silence between the notes that makes the music, it is the space between the bars that cages the tiger.
 
I may not have reined in my loquacious tongue, but I certainly now have a clue how to create the space that can uncage me.

​After I received my university degree, I went to work as an intern for a tire company in India. They sent me to a large plant to learn the manufacturing process. I knew nothing about business – people in my family were doctors, teachers and lawyers – but I was keen to learn.
 
The first day in the factory I noticed two signs everywhere: Danger and Safety First. Our bosses said Safety First meant keeping the workers’ life and limb safe was the first priority of the company. I felt a little skeptical though how just plastering the Danger signs would accomplish that. How could these protect the workers from the ubiquitous huge fabric cutting shears, giant milling machines and steaming red-hot molding presses? The employees not only had to work on these machines, they had to do it at a furious pace, producing their shift quota in eight relentless hours, with a short, solitary break. Every day they walked past these machines on dirty, slippery floors, worked with worn gloves and scarcely had time to don protective gear to save their eyes or ears.
 
My friend, Adi, another intern, to whom I voiced my concern, scoffed at my unease. “Are you a woman?” he asked. “All men’s jobs have minor risks like that. You have to watch out for those.” He concluded, “A job like that makes you strong.”
 
Three weeks later, I was scalded by an accidental contact with a steam pipe and observed that the pipe wasn’t insulated, as it easily could have been. Adi chided me instead on my carelessness and put the injury down to bad luck. “It certainly didn’t threaten your life or limb,” he said with finality.

A couple of months later, Adi was learning how to mix rubber compounds with chemicals on a two-roll mixing mill, when the mixing knife slipped from his hand and started going into the compound. Instinctively he put out his hand to retrieve the knife, and the rolling rubber sheet promptly trapped his hand and started dragging it into the nip of the two massive cast-iron rolling mills. By the time the charge-hand heard his scream and pulled the tripwire to stop the mill, the larger part of his arm had been ground into the mill. 

​A surgeon saved Adi’s life, but it took him months of treatment in a hospital and years of practice with a prosthetic device to return to normal life.
 
I wasn’t surprised to read years later in the company’s journal an article by Adi, emphasizing the need for safety awareness and advocating installation of better protective devices to safeguard workers.