​On my seventh birthday, I received a memorable gift. It made me very proud and utterly happy. I carried it everywhere with me. I showed it to all my friends. I used it every day and loved its feel. I call it memorable, for its memory is still vivid in my mind. Yet I can barely talk about it, for few will understand my ecstasy over a thing that the world now seems to regard as a quaint old thing whose time has passed.
 
I am talking of a fountain pen. A fountain pen! Many have no idea what it is. But it was a major innovation in its time. The legend is that a tenth-century Egyptian Caliph, tired of a dipping pen, ordered his men to devise something that did not soil his hands or clothes with ink. The fountain pen was born.

It was an ingenious idea. You did not dip it in ink, for it had an internal reservoir of liquid ink, which dripped through a nib thanks to gravity and capillary action. For seven long years I had contended with pencils, with hard lead and fragile wood. And, now, on the glorious morning of my seventh birthday, father and mother were presenting me with a red box wrapped in blue-and-yellow tissue, wherein nested a shiny navy fountain pen.
 
When filled with royal blue ink, of which my parents had generously bought an ample bottle, it wrote. And how! It wrote blithely, smoothly, copiously, for I kept wielding the instrument with untiring enthusiasm. I wrote snatches of poems I knew; I wrote smart aphorisms I had read; I wrote my name endless times. I had a precocious interest in fonts, and I thrilled to the egotistic artistry of writing my name in a thousand unusual ways.
 
It was a delight to hold its slick body in my fingers and an unspeakable pleasure to let it roll on paper. No longer the harsh scratch of a pencil on cheap paper, but the glissando movement of a magnificent tool across a sheet in ceaseless, soundless abandon. I did not share the venerable Caliph’s distaste for soiled fingers. I cared little when ink splattered my fingers as I used a clumsy dropper to fill the pen’s slender body with dark ink. We didn’t have soft-lead pencils earlier, so the contrasted bright lettering of a fountain pen was a joy to behold.
 
The truth was, despite my affection and tender care, the fragile plastic body of the pen cracked in a couple of years. Seeing my despair, a generous uncle bought me a new mottled-green pen. It was a second-generation pen, which did not need a dropper to fill it. It had a tube inside to hold the ink, and a clip outside that could be used to suck ink in the tube. Ramu, a rascal in my class, bought such a pen too and promptly developed the technique to squirt ink at the back of unwary classmates he resented for some obscure reason. Once caught, he was taken to the headmaster’s office and we never saw him again. Strangely, I missed Ramu’s perverse quirks.

​As in women, slenderness in pens has a charm for me, and twenty years have seen me adhere loyally to Cross pens, first ballpoint pens and then rollerball pens, especially when they have glossy lacquered finish. Apparently, I am not the only one who finds them charming. I have so far lost twenty-three of them. I would leave them on my unattended desk for ten minutes, even in well-heeled places like the World Bank or my Embassy den, and they would disappear in a jiffy.
 
Ballpoints have a point and rollerballs roll well, but frankly nothing can hold a candle to a fountain pen, if you care about writing. Pareshbabu, the soft-spoken septuagenarian who worked in Pen Hospital on Chowringhee and taught me all I know about pens, made me a world-class pen for thirty rupees: he spent the entire money on a superb nib and then fitted it on the body of an old pen. I still miss him and the pen.
 
I have affluent friends who swoon over Mont Blanc, but the costly pen I could crave is Faber-Castell’s 2015 Limited Edition pen that costs $5000. If I had money to burn, I would much rather go for the superb designs of the Italians, a Visconti or a Montegrappa.
 
Forget about luxe and design, a pen is for writing, and nothing writes better than a fountain pen. That is what Pareshbabu’s modest but matchless pen did for me. It inspired me to write. To fall in love with writing.
 
Last year, again on my birthday, Lina, who knows her father well, gave me the gift of a fountain pen. A somber, serious, get-to-work pen that my rebellious, playful heart cherishes.

I often get lost. Partly because I am absent minded. Partly because I am the opposite – present minded – and pay so much attention to what is around me that I overlook where I am going.
 
I am also good at losing things, books, pens, glasses, watches, phones and money. I haven’t yet lost my passport and ended up in detention. Curiously, I once got nearly detained for the opposite reason: I had too many passports – an Indian passport, for I was born in India, an American passport, for I lived in the US, an American diplomatic passport, for that was my status, and a blue UN passport, laissez-passer, for I worked for the World Bank.
 
The good thing about getting lost is that is that you are not really lost, you are with yourself, and end up, however late, in a hotel or in your home. The bad thing about losing things is that it can cause some inconvenience – at least the inconvenience of having to search for the missing thing. The worse is the irritation of not finding the missing thing at the end.
 
So, it was a pleasure, at the end of a modest but pleasant lunch in a museum café in Bochum, Germany, to hear my friends talk of their Lost and Found experience.
 
Ashis, my brother, narrated that, on his way back from Turkey, airport security asked him to remove the iPhone from his person and he quickly inserted it in the handbag on the conveyor belt. The handbag looked like his but was someone else’s. Returning home, he could not find his phone, checked his computer and found where the phone had ended up, in Bangalore.
 
He called the person, a government clerk, who was relieved to find that the unknown phone in his bag was not a terrorist’s explosive device. But he was irritated that he had to pay a large sum to mail it back to its owner. Ashis mailed him the money and a token amount as his reward. He felt the poor man merited some compensation for his hassle.
 
When Dorothy exited a tourist bus in Rome minus her backpack, her Italian friends said they were praying that she would recover the lost bag. Her German friends said lost valuables are seldom returned in Italy and suggested she forget about it. Dorothy went ahead and bought a new laptop, the most valuable thing lost in her backpack. When she fired up the laptop, the first message that popped up was a notice from the Italian police: she was required to recover within 24 hours a brown backpack including a laptop computer, which someone had found and deposited with the polizia nazionale.
 
Ulrik, a museum curator in Essen, had lost his wallet some years ago during a visit to East Germany. Despondent, he perked up when he received a call at home from a woman in Leipzig to say she had found the wallet. He returned to Leipzig, but the woman said she was sorry she no longer had the wallet. She had, as the rules required her to, handed the wallet over to the local police. Ulrik went to the police station, but the police didn’t have it either. According to rules, they had passed it to the East German Lost and Found section. Ulrik then rushed to the Lost and Found section, but, no, they didn’t have it either. They had it forwarded it to the West German police. Ulrik returned home frustrated, planning to pay a visit to the police the next day, to find the wallet, neatly ensconced in an envelope, hanging from his door knob. She called the East German woman the next day, to thank her and offered to send her some reward money. She refused any gift.
 
Jonathan then said that it was hard, nearly impossible, to lose anything in Japan. He had traveled in train from Osaka to Tokyo, and, after alighting, realized that he had left his briefcase in the train. He had no hope of retrieving the briefcase, but since it contained his passport he was obligated to report the loss to the railway police station. The conversation was not easy, for the police officer spoke scant English but he insisted that Jonathan see him the next day, precisely 3.47 pm.  Jonathan did not understand why and was particularly confused at the precise time specified, but he did turn up at the police station on time. The police officer rushed with him to the train platform, where the Osaka-Tokyo train approached, and the officer entered the compartment Jonathan indicated. They both saw the briefcase lying untouched exactly at the spot Jonathan had left it in his seat, though the train had shuttled between Osaka and Tokyo for three days.

​Losing may be disconcerting, often costly and discombobulating, but recovering a lost wallet, backpack or briefcase, against seemingly impossible odds, is certainly a great pleasure.
 
My mother, rather distraught, visited my father in the emergency ward of the largest hospital in Kolkata. When she returned I noticed, with the typical perceptiveness of a ten-year old, that her gold necklace, inherited from her grandmother, was missing. Maybe the clasp at the neck came undone as she walked. The precious necklace, we believed, was gone for good. The next day I accompanied my mother as she went to visit my father. As we were about to enter the hospital, we saw, on the street in front of the gates, where at least 50,000 people must have passed since my mother’s last visit, glinting in the bright afternoon sun my mother’s glittering 24-carat gold necklace.

My brother, Ashis, was to receive an international award and I made a quick hop from Iceland to arrive for the ceremony in Germany.
 
Bochum is one of the larger universities in northern Germany, located in a curious region that combines the pastoral with the industrial. That is where a major foundation had decided to honor him for his lifelong work on creativity and mass violence.
 
Many years ago, I had gone to Essen on the invitation of a mining company. I saw a highly industrialized area that bore the oversize footprint of the Krupp empire. Krupp was Europe’s largest company and for 400 years Germany’s main arms maker, producing tanks, ships, guns and cannons. Naturally, during the Second World War it became the top target of allied bombers. I saw huge destruction and massive reconstruction and came away with the impression of a mainly industrial Rhineland.
 
Now I was seeing the other side of the region, the softer, bucolic side.
 
An hour’s run from Dusseldorf, I was ensconced in a charming hotel. Away from the main road, and quite a few steps from a golf course, you walk up to a modern building that looks from afar a bit like a chalet. The view from my room consisted entirely of oak, fir and pine; I could go for a shower leaving my trousers on the bed.
 
A cool but bright day. I walked down the bluff where the hotel is located. A bricklayer and a mason, working on an annex of the hotel, sat sipping beer during lunch break. They politely took off their cap and waved. A young woman pushing a baby in a pram and crooning passed by and nodded.
 
I reached a side street and walked on. A caressing breeze, a long series of tall pines. A real pleasure to walk on the cleanest, smoothest sidewalk I have ever seen.
 
“Are you tired? Would you care to join us for dinner?” asked my host from the foundation.
 
I was tired after the briefest nap on the plane, but I was also hungry. I loved the salmon and salad, along with the suave Riesling.
​
A brief drizzle in the morning, a cooler air.
 
“Would you like to join us for a visit to an industrial museum?”
 
My past decided: I can’t skip a museum that has to do with mines, for I spent time in coal and metal mines in India. The museum was an ingenious one, housed in the gigantic coal washing plant that served the major factories of the area. The huge machines remain, and the three floors have been imaginatively converted into three linked exhibits: Memory, that depicts the ancient land; History, that tells the story of its industrialization; and Present, that offers a fascinating view of its fast-changing face from war production to peacetime industry.
 
I kept wondering if defunct factories in India, like the one I worked in, couldn’t be converted into a museum this fascinating.
 
The event in the evening was well attended. A large hall, many dignitaries and scholars, and a hearteningly large group of younger people. I do not endure long speeches well; the loss of time is seldom made up by a measurable gain of wisdom. There were three of them, telling us of the foundation, its purpose and activities, and the larger goals of the area’s universities. Then, somebody narrated my brother’s life work in the social sciences, his studies of creativity and mass violence.
 
Finally, came the climactic moment when Ashis received the Hans Kilian Award and started his talk on the 1947 killing of a million Indians and displacement of fourteen million more. It was a telling speech, but my mind wandered.

​I was thinking of the nine-year-old standing next to me at a third-floor window, while arsonists went about setting fire to our house. I was thinking of the boy walking with me to school and complaining that I walked too fast and missed the fun things on a Kolkata street. I was remembering an adolescent telling anecdotes to adoring, laughing friends in our favorite terrace. Eating in our aunt’s small kitchen and fancifully christening the egg casserole he liked. Hugging my disconsolate mother who missed his long absence in a faraway university. Telling me of his dreams to study scientists in a tiny Delhi apartment. His dramatic reappearance in my parents’ home with his simpering new bride. His happy, excited entry in a cherished research center. His long days and nights at work while I chatted and drank tea with his wife. Listening to Vilayet’s sitar together in his cozy but cold home in old Delhi. His endless writing and furious espousal of victims’ causes. The erupting hate of fanatics and our fear for his safety. His New Delhi home, the paintings on his walls that he loves, the torrential music that he adores, the overflowing books and research papers that fill every room. Our spirited walks on Delhi’s uneven streets. And our talk, unending talk, late at night, early morning, over tea, on rain-swept days and chilly nights.
 
Ashis finished, talking of the elderly Sikh who slit the throats of his daughters before they could be raped by invaders, and the thin ray of hope in the action of the gutsy few who tried to save the helpless many.
 
Time for the celebratory dinner and a joyous cocktail. Our last brief hour together. A plane waits to take him 4000 miles east. A very separate one flies me 4000 miles west into an alien sunset.

I am a champion of broken relations. I seem to simply wade through them.
 
When I look back, I see a long string of wrecked relationships. Yes, I have been lucky to have had splendid and happy relationships, but what seem to stand out are the many that ended, either with a bang or with a whimper.
 
Yet you would be wrong to think of me as exceptionally hard-hearted, for I cannot recall an instance when I ended a relationship. Either someone else did, or the relationship died on the vine. The question of who ended a relationship is usually a red herring. Often one backs out of it in the uneasy realization that it has lost its joie de vivre, even if the other hasn’t yet woken up to the reality.
 
The sad reality is that most relationships, just like most friendships, run of out of steam in a while. It is just a question of time. It is a cruel thing to say. Many will protest, recalling the time a friend or a lover abandoned them, and they angrily attributed it to an ignominious reason. Often the anger, coupled with humiliation, prevents them seeing that the link had, much earlier, begun to lose its shine.

​Why does that happen? For the simple reason that we change and grow, sadly but inevitably, in very different directions. A continuing relationship is a huge challenge. Two of us have to build bridges even while we move, like two independent rivers, over the uneven terrain of our lives and careers, dreams and ambitions. The moment we finish building a bridge, we find the rivers have changed courses, and there looms the arduous work of building another. Somebody said, in a melancholy martial metaphor, that the battlefield of love is never quiet: the moment you think the war is won, you have lost – unless you are ready to start all over again.
 
Others will recall relationships that have lasted a lifetime. Alas, length and apparent durability often mean very little. We well know that people outside of a relationship can really know nothing of its quality. Relationships that we see at close distance, like our parents and close relations and friends, might give the illusion that we are sure of their quality or even of their sincerity. Such impressions are particularly misleading, for we have an emotional stake in believing those relationships were ideal, if not perfect.
 
It is a sad but safe guess that only a small number of relations are fully satisfying and continue to be so. Their continuity proves little. People continue in a relation for a vast variety of reasons, some exalted, some less so. Some continue from a sense of loyalty. A woman may not leave her lover because he is suddenly disabled; a husband decides not to abandon his grievously ill wife. Some continue in a dismal, even abusive, relationship because of religious or family reasons. Others stay on for their young children. A vast number continue in relationships that mean little to them simply because the alternative is inconvenient, impractical, fearsome or simply economically impossible. After persisting in a liaison for twenty years where does a middle-aged woman, without an attractive career or independent resources, go, especially if she has children? An aging man would rather adhere to his cozy habits than set out on a quest for a more meaningful relationship.
 
These are not reasons for frivolously ending a relationship, but to take note that relations do sunder, often, for good reason. When they do, it causes immeasurable pain. I know it well. It is an agony that nothing extinguishes, and few things extenuate. Even if I were to walk away from a relationship, I would sense a void for months and nurture a nostalgia for years. It is an ache that endures, a scar that forever welts the heart’s hinterland.
 
The truth is if anyone has entered my world, it was for a reason. Long after she has left, her footprint remains, cast as in concrete. No storm, no rain, not even the brightest spring to come can erase that print. Like Omar Khayyam’s moving finger, my life moves on, but the timeworn texts remain, however yellow they become, however faint the print.
 
I sometimes wonder what those old pages of my scroll mean. Are there embers of the old flame that could reignite in a flash? A thousand stories, a million lyrics have sprung on the theme, but I really don’t know the answer. The heart that pulsed then, pulses still, and will perhaps beat faster again to hear your voice, sensing the music that once convulsed my life. Maybe the glow of the past sunset will still redden our firmament.
 
But, who knows, maybe we will look at each other, as strangers on an unfamiliar planet, take uneasy measure of each other, find a familiar resonance in a glance or a gesture, then feel overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of the newness, the strangeness, the dismaying, disheartening changes, and, with a polite word or smile, go our separate ways, reconciled to the absoluteness of our loss and the comforting melody of our souvenirs.

As I stepped out of my home, I came face to face with Myrna.
 
Myrna is the tousle-haired two-year old daughter of my neighbors, Jim and Jenna. This morning her hair looked even more tousled. She possibly slipped out of her home as soon as she woke up.
 
She was wearing a green frock and a bright yellow top and seemed to be keenly studying something in her hand.
 
The moment I said Hello, she turned to show me what she held in her hand. It was just a light-gray stone, a small one, almost an oversize pebble. It fitted neatly in her small palm.
 
I examined the stone and found nothing special about it. My face might have shown it. Myrna does not talk yet, but she pointed the stone with her little finger and wanted me to study it as well as she was doing it.
 
One would think she was holding Aladdin’s lamp in her hand. She reverently held the stone, gazed steadfastly at its invisible-to-me charm and even kept pointing at it repeatedly. Clearly, I was missing something.
 
Finally, I said to her, “Okay, let me take a close look,” and extended my open palm, signaling her to place the stone there.

​A moment’s hesitation, then she gently placed the stone on my hand. I adjusted my glasses, determined to take a very close look.
 
A plain oval stone, slightly elongated asymmetrically, gray in color, but the shade is marginally darker on one side. Then I noticed what I thought Myrna was pointing to: a tiny blue-black spot at the stone’s edge. It was easily overlooked, but Myrna’s avid investigation had revealed it to her. I looked at the spot keenly and found it dark blue at the edge but clearly black at the center.
 
I was amazed. I cross the walkway in front of my home twenty times each day, but I had never observed this stone – or any stone like it. Light gray, shaded, with a blue-black spot, with a dark ebony center. Myrna could have picked up the stone only from this walkway. It had taken a two-year old to find something unique that I hadn’t noticed – probably nobody had noticed – and surprise me with her discovery.

I keep a chair in the yard in front of my home, and I sat there to examine the stone further. Myrna stood expectantly by, waiting for something interesting to happen. Somehow, as I looked at the stone, I saw it with a new set of eyes. My point of view had morphed, for now I was trying to see the stone with the curiosity of a little girl. Suddenly a simple stone had gained a new significance, almost a new glow.
 
Just then Jenna came running.
 
“Good Heavens! You are here,” she said, in a tone of relief, to the child.
 
Then she turned to me and said, “I just opened the front door to get the newspaper. Just a moment or two. I had no idea Myrna had slipped out. I was looking for her all over the house!”
 
Jenna picked up Myrna in her arms and took her home, probably for her breakfast. The stone remained with me.
 
I sat in my chair and turned the stone over and looked at it from every possible angle. Yes, it was just an ordinary stone, a plain gray stone, indistinguishable perhaps from ten or twenty other stones on our walkway. It had gained a special significance only because a little girl picked it up, gave it all her attention and invested it with a remarkable aura that derived only from her marvelous, innocent curiosity.
 
It made me think of the thousand other things, lying all around me, in the walkway, on the next street, around all sides of my home, near the garage, on my deck, to which I paid no attention, for I assumed them all to be ordinary things that merited no attention. I gave them no importance; I had no curiosity about them; I had really no interest in them.
 
And then came a little girl, innocently picked up a stone, gave it all her focus and made it so very special.
 
I wonder how many things around me, on all sides, I overlook and neglect entirely, assuming them to be of no importance, while they shine in their unique beauty, just waiting for a set of curious eyes to spot them and give them all the significance they merit.

I knew Ravi was a controversial person. I did not know how controversial.
 
He joined the administrative department where I worked and was allotted an office next to mine. We quickly became friends.
 
He was a good-looking, articulate man, who came, did his work and went home. He did not seem particularly social; he made no effort to cultivate his colleagues in our department. But I went out of my way to talk to him, for he seemed an interesting person. Guarded at first, he gradually turned affable. I invited him for lunch to a Japanese restaurant. He invited me for dinner at his home. I found his wife charming and enjoyed meeting his young son and daughter.
 
It was then that I discovered that he had a large circle of friends and he maintained a very social life. He had parties every week. They were lively affairs and I became a fixture. Ravi not only invited me every time, he took great care to make sure I met all his friends and was very generous in his remarks while introducing me.

​I realized that he had many friends because he was remarkably thoughtful with them. He enjoyed their company, and he went to great lengths to make their visits to his home enjoyable. He was the most punctilious host I had ever known, constantly checking you had enough canapés and your glass was full.
 
Ravi had moved to our department from the marketing division, where he had been a rising star for several years. Somehow his stock had suddenly sunk and he was abruptly transferred to our department under a cloud. I never judge a man by the rumors he evokes; I did not ask Ravi what caused his ejection from another part of the company.
 
Quite by accident the marketing director, Parikh, called me for a meeting. He said his division was planning a strategy session to deal with new market trends and the finance director had recommended my name as a source of maverick ideas. I was flattered, but I was attracted even more by Parikh’s interest in new ideas. He appeared genuinely anxious to innovate.
 
The session took place three weeks later. The entire time I worked with Parikh in developing alternative strategies, some of them quite novel and unusual, and they proved invaluable in generating probing questions and heated discussion. Parikh and his colleagues thought it was a successful meeting and invited me to a celebratory dinner at Parikh’s home.
 
It was a very pleasant evening. We basked in the glow of a successful project and some thought it would lead to money-spinning initiatives. Parikh was in an upbeat mood and insisted, at a late hour after dinner, that we all share in his favorite cognac. Unexpectedly, the conversation turned to Ravi and his ejection from the marketing division.
 
Parikh turned out to have been the main force in engineering his removal and proudly declared that, with Ravi gone, the division would function bettter. He went a step further and said, “Ravi was quite a worthless fellow. I think our division is better off without him.
 
Sitting in front of him were all his important deputies. One quickly responded, “No question, he was quite worthless.” The one next to him felt he had to take up the cue and said, “I am glad he is out of our division. He was useless.” The others, perhaps aided by their inebriation, promptly added to the chorus. One referred to Ravi as a “known rascal” and another chose to nominate him a “total bastard.”
 
Suddenly, Parikh turned to me and said, “I hear he has become your close friend. I am sorry if it bothers you, but Ravi was really a bastard.”
 
The cognac had begun, in the last few minutes, to taste a little tasteless. I took a breath.
 
I said to Parikh, “I know Ravi for only a few months. Many of you know him for years. You know him much better. If you think he is a bastard, he must be one.
 
“But, you see, I can only speak of what I know. Not only I can, I must. I must bear witness to the truth that I have seen and known.
 
“Let me tell you what that truth is. I know that Ravi is a wonderful husband. A loving, affectionate father.
 
“I also know that Ravi is a hard worker and a helpful colleague.
 
“Above all, I know that he is a superb and thoughtful and caring friend.
 
“So, I don’t care if he is a bastard. I care that he is a loyal friend and I cherish his friendship. That is the truth I know. I will testify to that truth from the housetop, to my last breath, for that is only truth I have known.”
 
There was a stunned silence. A young no-status newcomer wasn’t expected to dare such a riposte to a senior director and his drumbeaters.
 
For a loquacious man, Parekh remained quiet for a long time.
 
Then he quietly said, “Manish is quite right to stand up for his friend.” Then he had the extraordinary sense to correct himself, “Rather, he is right to stand up for what he thinks is the truth.”