I was born in a large town in central India, Nagpur, and grew up in a huge metropolis in eastern India, Kolkata. Bricks, mortar and concrete were my daily reality. I saw buildings, neat and grimy, streets, paved and muddy, markets, large and smelly, and an endless pageant of pull-carts and rickshaws, old cars and rickety buses. My daily landscape consisted of a slowly emerging sunrise behind the smoky plumes of an extensive slum and a swift, glowing sunset beyond the rusting gray-brown domes of ancient warehouses.
​
There was nothing green anywhere in sight. Nature, in any form, could barely intrude.
 
My father, who spend his early childhood in a village and remained loyal to those memories, tried hard to create a patch of lawn at the back of our home. Alas, the grass was moribund. He tried, with less of a disaster, to grow some flowering plants. He put them in slender vases in each room. But not mine, for he knew I did not care much for the large flowers favored in India. He joked, “You don’t care for flowers? You could be an assassin!” I favored small non-flowering plants and large, rugged trees, none of which I encountered where I lived.

​I read about nature in my books. There was a slight change of temperature during winter and mother insisted I affect a cardigan when I leave for school, but autumn and spring came and went quite unnoticed. These were ballyhooed in poems I read, with references to flora I could never recognize. All the literary excitement about the change of seasons seemed highly exaggerated to me. I saw few signs of their manifestation in my world.
 
If a season at all made a debut in my mind, it was the monsoon. There were tons of songs about the rains, their beauty and majesty. What was most notable for me was the predictable flooding of the streets where I lived. All we needed was a couple of hours of rain, and there would be knee-deep, sometimes waist-deep, water in the street. It was filthy water, but that little bothered me or my friends. Defying all motherly concern, we simply had to have the fun of wading through swirling waters, floating paper boats and inspecting the havoc they caused to the little shops and huts.
 
My real encounters with nature were infrequent and unimpressively short. I remember wading through snow in Pahalgam and, more memorably, running my fingers through the still waters of Dal lake, prone in a boat. I remember too the brief and beautiful days in Darjeeling, though the town had already turned less pastoral and more a tourist spot. But more than the hills and mountains, it was the sea that left a lasting imprint on my mind. We never had the money for a cruise, but when I went with friends for a modest trip to Digha, the immensity of the water left me speechless. I swam away from my buddies and stood in the water up to my neck, and had a strong, strange feeling: I could live friendless, without the vital company of others that has always been my elixir, only if I were to live in the sands next to an ocean. It was too mammoth to let me entertain a single small thought, even a moment’s meditation on my loneliness.
 
Then my world changed. Crisscrossing the globe became my routine. Something must have broken open inside me. Three insignificant incidents come to mind.
 
I sat sipping bitters on Piazza San Marco in Venice when my friend said, “Look!” I don’t recall what she was pointing at, but I clearly remember the tilting late-afternoon sun, the floating clouds, the solitary boat paddling across glorious, rippled waters and I was suddenly in a state of ineffable peace. I scratched the idea of Italy’s other charms, lingered in Venice for ten days, and every evening went to sit, pointlessly, in the Piazza.
 
Strangely sleepless after a well-traveled day, I came out of my oasis haven in the Libyan desert one night and walked quietly for an hour in the sands. Not a word, not a sound. I felt I was close to heaven.
 
Most curious was the most prosaic experience. I had gone for dinner to the home of a Haitian friend in the hills of Pétionville and, as I got out of the car, my eyes widened: next to the house was the most unbelievably perfect lawn, like an inviting green carpet, just the kind my father would have aspired for. I waited not a second. Disregarding my well-pressed evening suit, I lay down on the grass, looked up at the stars and said a prayer of benediction. It was the finest moment of my life.
 
Now I live in a quiet suburb of Washington, a green paradise. I walk at dawn through woods and shrubs, hear the rustling of leaves as deer and squirrels scurry through the tall trees, and know that, Nature, that had long eluded me, has finally made a friend of me.

It was a difficult time in my life when I met Cynthia. My relationships were at an abysmal point. My work seemed banal and meaningless. I craved for a change, a radical change, but I didn’t know how to bring it about.
 
Cynthia was an Indian American, who lived in Chicago but was vacationing in Kolkata, where she had family members. She was a friend who did not know how to be friendly, except occasionally, but we still struck a chord. Perhaps we both felt tossed by events beyond our control and longed for some quiet.
 
She spoke of the time she moved from Paris to New York.
 
“I had a good job in a fashion house. I looked good, I felt good. It felt good to be admired and pursued by presentable men. Then suddenly it was all over. The house had problems and wanted to downsize. I had no option but to return to the city I had known earlier.
 
“In New York, I found a job quickly, in a radio station. With the recruiter, my looks went far. The fact that I had lived with my dad in different countries and spoke a bunch of languages was also a help. To find an apartment, anything near the station, proved very hard, nearly impossible. The rent was sky-high and I was to make a huge deposit. I couldn’t. I kept looking, desperately and almost despairingly.
 
“Finally, I hit on a tiny apartment in the West End, in a dilapidated building. There was nothing right with the apartment: noisy heating, poor plumbing, pathetic bathroom, ‘cozy’ meaning minuscule bedroom, and noisy any time of the day. But the rental was reasonable. I took it. I didn’t have another option.
 
“The first two weeks I found everything wrong with the apartment and bitterly thought of looking for another. In the next two weeks, I found out what I already knew. I couldn’t get anything better that I could afford. At the end of the month, when I had to pay the next month’s rent, I had an epiphany. I looked at my miserable apartment and said to myself, ‘I could live here.’
 
“That changed everything. I was suddenly calm and reconciled. I made a list of about ten things that I could fix, or at least replace at a low cost. That kept me busy for another month. My whole life consisted of office, hardware stores and fixing things at home. I found, to my surprise, I could do it. The apartment began to look presentable.
 
“By the next month, I had a list of another ten things I wanted improve. In the third month the landlord came to take a look at his new tenant and liked what he saw of the changed apartment: new curtains, new lamps, new bookcase, even a new fancy bedcover and a new center table in the living room. He melted and offered to pay for some of items.
 
“But the big change was not in landlord’s mind, but in my heart. I no longer wanted to look for a good apartment. I loved my own apartment, what I had made of it – and making of it every other week. I enjoyed it, wanted to come back to it. Impetuously I invited all my colleagues for a party in my small apartment. They thought me rather mysterious, for I never joined their after-office parties. They all came, with wine and food, and made it into a scintillating party.
 
“At last, I had a home that I liked, where I felt peaceful and happy.”
 
I never thought of Cynthia as a level-headed person and I did not think of her story as a parable with a practical implication. But I was looking earnestly for a change. Her story had strange reverberations in my mind. In ten days, I made up my mind.

The company had earlier offered me a leased apartment, which I had refused, considering the hassle of a move. Now I told them I would accept a leased home in the southern part of town.

​They were going to repaint the house and wanted me to tell them the preferred color scheme. I surprised them by saying everything should be white. I would add the color myself.
 
I sold all my furniture and prepared designs for furniture for each room. As I was inexperienced, I would show the designs to manufacturers, get their comments, revise the designs and go back to show the new designs and get more comments. Finally, I had the sofa and chairs and bookcases of my choice. The upholstery and the cushions had to be white of course.
 
In the large dining room, I placed a small oval table. I wanted people to sit close together; the food could be on two trolleys. When guests asked why a tiny table in a large hall, I said, “To encourage promiscuity.”
 
I dumped all the furniture from the old apartment and took only my books to the new house.
 
It remained to add the color to a home which so far had only white and black. I created calligraphic paintings out of poems I liked, from Yeats to Jibanananda, and made huge enlargements of my photographs. I made a solarized cutout of myself, in a stance of taking a photo, and placed it at the entrance of my home: it was an unconventional greeting for every visitor who deigned to visit my home.
 
My home even had a name, Bandersnatch, a la Lewis Carroll, suggesting a mythical, monstrous beast. Me.
 
Finally, it was my home. I felt peace. Even joy.

Peter Shaffer wrote a funny play, The Private Eye, about a wealthy accountant who suspects his wife of infidelity and sets a detective on her. Only to discover that she is not having an affair but renting an empty apartment. She goes there surreptitiously and cleans it thoroughly, a chore she enjoyed earlier and now misses sorely in her affluent married home.
 
The play touched a chord with me, for I have come to enjoy a bit of physical labor in my life. Of course, like many people in Washington, I clear the snow from my doorsteps a few times each winter. I have also at times felt energetic enough to polish my shoes or change some bulbs. But these would not have pleased Shaffer’s heroine so infrequent they are.
 
My chosen assignment is cleaning clothes. I grew up in India and had seen washerwomen thrash clothes, covered with soapsuds, against large stones almost like a ritual of personal purification. But US houses come equipped with large washers and dryers, and the chore left to me is to iron them. Calendering is my favorite way to relax.

​After their bout with the washer, all my shirts emerge from the dryer wrinkled and crumpled. The irons that you buy today are a long shot from the huge, heavy irons I had seen laundries use earlier. They are lightweight, easily maneuverable and spew quantities of steam. They are the czars of the laundry room and liquidate wrinkles at the first contact. To me it is fun to run the iron over a furrowed, rumpled shirt and see it instantly transformed into a beautiful wearable shirt with a smooth look and a stiff collar, almost a work of art.
 
There are different ways of ironing a shirt and I have seen people follow a different order. I have tried some of them and settled on a hierarchy. The sleeves, short or long, are really appendages to the main structure and I like to address them first. The collar, unquestionably the centerpiece of the shirt, is most important and should be taken up the last. There remains the body of the shirt, which I believe can be ironed from left to right or right to left, depending on your choice. When doing the collar, people seem to agree that it is better to iron the reverse side first, before offering the coup de grace and emerging with the shining, streamlined ironed shirt.
 
There are few things so fully satisfying as to begin with a limp, crushed shirt and end with an elegant well-calendared shirt. With the first shirt, I am just beginning; with the second or third, I feel like I am settling down to my noble task; by the fifth, sixth, at most seventh, my heart is singing. I feel one has to be extremely hard-hearted to miss the joy of ironing.
 
Last year I spent several weeks in Colombia and Bonita came every weekend to do housekeeping chores in the apartment. After clearing the large washload, she was surprised to find that señor preferred to iron his shirts himself. I could have saved some time, but I thought it was an excellent use of my time to wield the iron myself.
 
In India, my hosts, the Roys, have a streamlined system: a domestic, Urmila, washes and dries the clothes at home, before Ajay, the chauffeur, takes them to the corner laundryman who irons them and sends them back neatly arranged and bundled. It was all done with great care, and my shirts came back in with a shiny new look. But I had noticed an iron and an ironing board at the far corner of their library – a favorite haunt of mine – and I saw no reason not to take an occasional shirt to the library late at night, after the Roys were safely in bed, and iron it to my heart’s content.
 
Why iron, ask my friends. Why not, I say in reply, for it is one of the simple activities of life where you have the satisfaction to see worthy completion very quickly. You see, in just a few minutes, how well you have done. If you have not done well for some reason, you have the chance to improve on it. The work pleases you. You have the joy of completion. Try it.
 
I was studying a dismal report on American football players who have had serious brain concussion: their personalities changed, they became irritable, angry, unstable, even violent. I was stunned that some of these people get calm by laundering their clothes. Their wives say they are peaceful when they iron, sometimes repeatedly, their clothes. Their affluent wives let them do that.
 
I remember as a child, traveling early morning in a train in India, and watching from the moving window the washerwomen hard at work, cleaning clothes, thumping them against stones, rinsing them in a pond, putting them up to dry on posts. Dark, gaunt, vigorous, almost heroic figures, rapt in their labor. Perhaps they were sending me a message it took me many years to learn. We better join the league of human beings when we do a spot of physical labor and see the fruit of our labor.

Thunder is not supposed to strike you twice. I feel it has hit me twice. In quick succession too.
 
I had a great full-fledged plan to visit India. I was to live in a pleasant club, meet old and new friends, attend a college reunion and have a fine time. Two weeks before my flight, the retina in my right eye came apart. The world darkened along with my vision.
 
After three grueling months, just as I exulted over my recovered sight, I collapsed in pain. Excruciating pain, it turned out, caused by two oversize stones in my kidney. I had to have what surgeons modestly call procedures, four of them, three under general anesthesia.
 
In both cases, the affliction, unpleasant as it was, was trivial compared to the agony of the cure.
 
I have forbidden myself to write of these experiences. Few like to read of others’ pain. I believe most people would rather stay away from it. As for the medical response, that is another dismal story, better devoted to another place, another time.
 
I feel tempted, however, to talk about something interesting I discovered, quite by accident, in this murky period.

​Indeed, I had a lot of pain. Sustained, at times acute, gut-wrenching pain. But I also had an insight.
 
I cannot recall a period in my life when I did not have pain. As a child I fell as I ran and hurt myself. As an adolescent I hurt myself playing soccer. Of course, I did not stop running or playing soccer. Sometimes the pain lasted, and I felt it as I ran, played or did anything else. What helped me to go on was the observation that I wasn’t the only one to be hurt. Others fell too, had abrasions and cuts, flinched as caustic medicine was put on the wound, but in a day or two returned to join the game. Why did we all do it?
 
However young and naïve, we saw the connection very quickly. Pain is the price for any kind of fun. If you climbed a tree, you fell sometimes. If you raced your friends, you tripped and hit the dust occasionally. If you ran furiously to outstrip your opponents and score a goal at close range, you could slip and hit the goal post and nurse the agony for a week. Whatever I enjoyed doing, entailed the risk of aches and anguish. If I wanted to avoid all pain, I had to sit at home and avoid all of life.
 
One more thing. Every time I hurt myself, my friends, even those I didn’t consider close friends, came running to help. They showed concern, escorted me home and came to see me if I did not turn up to play. I loved it and wondered what created that special link. They knew and felt keenly what had happened to me because it had happened to them – or to their brother or a close friend. By getting hurt, I was joining the grand army of those who had suffered pain and become part of the ‘band of brothers’ who shared a common experience.
 
Pain is the great leveler, the power nexus that joins us human beings. You can be a captain of industry or a mere clerk, a renowned surgeon or his bullied nurse-in-training, a powerful and eloquent politician or his humble driver, but you are all vulnerable to pain. A sudden, stinging pain can bring you down from your pinnacle of glory or raise you from your trough of insignificance and join you to the league of human beings linked by the invisible chain of pain.
 
I do not believe in the absurdly heroic idea that whatever does not kill you makes you stronger. Nor do I accept the cruel theological notion that God sends you some horrific forms of pain to purify your soul. CS Lewis wrote of suffering as a divine megaphone, to make us hark to virtuous counsel. If some deity has to break one’s bones or gnaw one’s organs to induce piety, then almighty he might be but all-merciful he is certainly not.
 
Pain is not just unpleasant but evil. Medical science, seldom at the forefront of human thought, has now come around to the idea that pain, even for a cure, must be reduced for the long-term wellbeing of patients. It is good that pharmaceutical ingenuity is now keen to help humans lower their load of pain.
 
As I lay in hospital beds, looking at the prostate men and women around me and hearing their piteous voices, I had a new awareness of the human destiny. We must live, we must act, we must enjoy; and we must sometimes pay the price of some pain. As we twinge and writhe in suffering, we are also forging our link with the rest of the human race. In all our pride and foolishness, that is one morsel of truth we must cling to.

Last Saturday I did something spectacular. I flew a kite for several hours. It was a bright and beautiful day, and the winds were just right. It helped that the park was nearly deserted; nobody got in my way. It was nearly perfect. The only glitch was that there was nobody else to fly a kite, nobody to fight with.
 
To say in the US “Go fly a kite” is not a friendly admonition, but equivalent to saying, “Go jump in the lake.” But, instead of getting offended if one were to act on the advice, I believe one would discover a whole new world. It is a pity that few fly kites in the US. The Americans are missing out on a great deal of fun. Baseball and bowling simply don’t compare.
 
Vir was my tutor when I evinced interest in flying kites. He lived next door to me in Kolkata and was a legend for his exploits in the kite fight universe. For long I had watched passively the colorful panoply of kites in the smoky Kolkata sky. I had finally persuaded my parents to advance me the money for a string-winder spool, locally called latay, and two kites.
 
We lived then in a large apartment building with an extensive terrace, the ideal base for aerial exploration. I loved to be on the terrace, making my kite rise little by little, higher and higher, until it was safe to scamper to the left or right, without the fear of my kite suddenly diving with an adverse wind and being lost. I learned to take advantage of a mild breeze and slowly earned the skill of maneuvering my kite at will. Vir came periodically to assist me, at first to teach me the basics and then to show me the subtleties of kite manipulation.
 
Vir was a couple of years older than me and worked as a lowly assistant in a grocery store. He couldn’t get a better job, for he was a middle-school dropout. But I admired his encyclopedic knowledge of kites. Unlike the Chinese and Japanese experts, Indian aficionados do not use kites of vastly different shapes, sizes and hues. Indian kites are usually diamond-shaped and short-tailed, distinguished by simple, streamlined designs and quaint names. Vir taught me all: Candle, Glass, Ball, Heart, Betel and Star, displaying those designs; two-colored kites called DoubleBall, NorthSouth, EastWest, BronzeFaced or DogEared, depending on the distribution of their colors; three- and four-colored kites; and lavishly colored kites called Peacock. Though I longed for a peacock, I went, short-funded, for Glass or BronzeFaced whichever was cheaper.

​But I had to take the next step in short order. Though I was content to fly on my own and watch my kite streaking across the clouds, I had to take note of the scores of other kites in the sky. In the most painful way. I was quietly flying on my own a Thursday afternoon, a festival day, when another kite came close swiftly, without warning. It swooped down like lightning, placed its thread on mine, and swiftly released the abrasive thread to snap my line. In a second, my blue-yellow Glass kite, chopped tetherless, floated like a lost cloud and was gone. I was disconsolate, not just because I didn’t have money for another kite. My pride, not to mention my sense of assurance, was dented. I had to do something.
 
Now Vir’s expertise came of use. “It is a kite-eat-kite world,” he said firmly. “Even if you want to stay by yourself, the predators will come and eat you alive. You have to defend yourself.”
 
That meant a full battle cry. I had to learn the strategy and maneuvers of kite war and I had to have the abrasive thread that can decapitate an aggressive kite. I became Vir’s avid apprentice and quickly mastered the push-pull-turn of kite warfare. Then we set about creating the finest killing thread. We ground glass, added adhesive and turmeric for color, passed the thread through this monstrous mix and then dried it before winding it around the spool. Now we had the murderous thread to kill or be killed.
  
The next few weeks were exciting. I lost several kites, but I also felled several adversaries. I found it embarrassing to call out the victory word, “Wo katta” (vanquished), but my mentor had no such compunction and hollered at every turn. If by chance the chopped kite flew in my direction, we had the bonus of gaining an additional kite. Doubtless it was the modern equivalent of the ancient, brutal practice of gathering a scalp.
 
Last Sunday, as I stood on high ground in the Virginia park and saw my blue-green kite flying gloriously against the bright late-morning sky, my heart sang. I was back again in Kolkata, on the terrace of a tall building in College Street, thrilling to the joy of doing something pointless and wonderful, my unbounded soul rising with every ascent of my kite, higher and higher, until it reached the acme of peace and beauty and total fulfillment.

This morning I attended the memorial service for Nina. It was in the small Baptist church a mile or so from my home. There were about seventy people, a large number of them young children. Nina was barely eight. It felt incongruous that I, a much older person, should be attending the service of a child. In all fairness, it should have been the reverse. I did not want to attend for that reason. It was too painful to be reminded of her glowing, smiling face. But her mother had sent a card with a handwritten note. I had to attend.
 
When I am at home and the weather is pleasant, I have two special places to sit and read. Or to write or simply relax. One is the deck at the back of my home, where I feel I am in a garden, surrounded by tall evergreens. The other is the small pebble-strewn Japanese-style front yard, where I have a comfortable outdoor chair with a tiny side table. On a lazy Sunday afternoon, the table may hold a glass of rosé wine. At other times, it has a cup of French-roast black coffee. It may even have the adjunct of a large coffee-filled flask if I am enmeshed in an Ewan McKuen novel.
 
I sat in the front yard one summer evening, reading The Atlantic and sipping some lemonade, when a lively voice interrupted me.
 
“Is this your home?”
 
I looked up to see a six-year old in a maroon frock, a round face framed by two braids.

​“Yes, I live here.”
 
“Do you like it?”
 
“Indeed, I rather like it.”
 
“Why?” For a little girl, she seemed rather curious.
 
I had to think. I said, “Because it is large enough to be comfortable, and yet small enough to be cozy.”
 
I am not sure she understood, but she smiled.
 
I asked, “Now tell me where your home is.”
 
“It is far away,” she said, and then pointed to a house just two blocks away.
 
“I am glad you walked all this way to make my acquaintance. Won’t you sit down?”
 
She did not sit down but asked another question. She was full of questions.
 
“Where are your children?”
 
“Sadly, they have grown up. They have gone to homes of their own.”
 
That was only the first of our exchanges. The weather was nice, I had novels and newspapers to read, and I liked seeing my young visitor, Nina. Her mother, who occasionally accompanied her, thought she was intruding and tried to steer her away. She finally saw that the intrusion was welcome. Novels cannot compete with a pretty little interrogator in red and yellow frocks.
 
“What are you reading?”
 
“It is a story book.”
 
“I have story books. Mommy reads them to me.”
 
“Really? What kind of stories do you like?”
 
“Lions, birds, dolls,” she pondered as she recounted. Then, with great finality, “I like stories about princesses.”
 
“You look like a princess to me. Somebody should write a story about you.”
 
She seemed pleased.
 
She went on a different tack, “Can you write a story?”
 
“I try. I haven’t written one about a princess yet.”
 
“You write a story about a princess. And a prince, and a horse,” her voice trailed off, as she thought of more things to add.
 
We had a thunderstorm one night. Nina duly reported the next day about the two trees she had seen on the ground while on a walk with her mother. She had a special interest in the squirrels, especially the baby squirrels she saw scurrying around. Her biggest excitement was the deer she noticed one early morning. Her mother had complained the deer had eaten her flowers. But the daughter had a different view.
 
“I like the deer. I want them to come again.”
 
“I like them too. I am sure the deer will come again now that it knows it has admirers here.”
 
Last Friday I went out for a long walk during dusk. There was nobody on the trail when I walked back. Then I saw a deer peeking out of the woods.
 
I felt sad instead of being happy to see it, for I knew my little friend wouldn’t see it. Nina hadn’t visited me for several days and I asked her mother when I encountered her in the local market.
 
“She is not well,” she said. “My mother has an uncommon syndrome that blocks her heart periodically. I have a mild version of it and take medicine for it, but Nina has inherited an acute variant of the disease. She can’t even walk a short distance. We keep her home.”
 
I had naively assumed that a spry little girl will one day get over an unfortunate but temporary affliction. Then came the card inviting me to the memorial meeting.
 
I will never write the story she might have liked about the princess who waited for the prince on horseback. It has to be only a brief sketch of a little princess who left a smile and a question or two in the air.