I had lived and worked several years in Haiti and had fallen in love with the country. I found the Haitians warm-hearted and hospitable. I was pleased when my doctor in Washington suggested a consultation with a urologist and he turned out to be from Haiti.
 
Maurice was a tall, strong man with an impressive moustache. In contrast, he was notably mild-mannered and spoke in a soft undertone. Doctors get into the habit of talking to their patients in a commanding voice. But everything Maurice said sounded like a modest suggestion. I instantly liked the guy.
 
When I mentioned my stint in Haiti, he was curious. We had a long talk. After that, any time we met our conversation veered soon from medical issues. We talked about our lives, our likes and distastes, our precarious hopes. We became friends.

​It was a shock when he mentioned that he may have to pass me on to his professional partner, for he was not keeping well. He confided to me that he had cancer of the lungs, one of the deadlier types. He said he was about to undergo a more recent therapeutic procedure, immunotherapy, but did not have great hope. His cancer was quite advanced.
 
The last time I saw him, after only a few months, he looked quite different. He seemed an old, tired man, a shadow of the person I knew earlier. He said I was the last patient he was seeing, specially so that he could say goodbye.
 
Eight weeks later I received a card telling me of his memorial service in the local Catholic church. It was a large church, but it was overflowing with people. Clearly Maurice had a lot of friends and patients. And they cared enough to come to the service. I sat in the last pew and thought of the gentle person I will not see again.
 
When I came face to face with his wife at the end of the service, I had a hard time finding words. What could I say to express my sense of loss? What could anyone say to a woman who had just lost her husband? I managed to murmur that I would miss Maurice. Then I stepped back.
 
When I came out of the church, it was late afternoon. The church’s grounds were well kept, and green lawns looked plush and pretty. It was really a lovely afternoon, and everything seemed right with the world. Everything, except that Maurice was no longer there. He will never again be seen and heard. The dismal thought occurred to me that in a few days, at most in a few months, most people would have forgotten about Maurice. He would only linger in the thoughts of a select few.
 
Yet the many who came to his service signaled that his life had meant something to them. A doctor offers his service in exchange for a fee. Surely that is not all that Maurice had meant to the hundreds I saw. He had meant something special to me and surely to some others. People had left their chores and driven from all parts of the city to come and honor his memory. It was their homage to the man.
 
What more could one do for a person who was no longer with us? I pondered as I drove home in the gathering dusk.
 
When friends and relatives die, I am always short of words. I don’t find words that seem to equal the occasion. It seems gauche to speak of the loss and deepen the wound of those who are already grieving. But it also seems a graceless oversight not to speak of the person whom we are all mourning. In this dilemma, do I wax eloquent or remain just quiet? Seldom do I know the answer.
 
We are all busy and we all have pressing concerns. So little time to quarantine a part of our day to mull over a departed doctor or fallen friend. Our memories sink like a coin in the bottomless well of busy and busier days. If a fond recollection surfaces in a fleeting moment when our head strikes a pillow at a late hour, its longevity cannot long outpace our fatigue. It seems cruel to say so, but affection can seldom outlast the daily battle of living well or going ahead. Loyalty to the dead fights a losing skirmish with the demands of the living.
 
Yet I find the past sustains us. My friend Joanna says, “The best things about the past is that nobody can take it away from you.” Quite right. Nobody can obliterate how you were lionized when you scored the winning goal in a soccer match against a competing school. Nor can anybody dim the shine on the silver medal you got for the best entry in an essay competition. Or of the luminous smile of your six-year-old when you placed the big red toy truck next to the birthday cake. Or the friends who brightened your days. Those are the recalls that give you the joy of living.
 
And I will recall Maurice, his soft voice, smooth manners, gentle counsel and warm company. There will be a void, but a void redolent of loving thoughts.

​I started my career working in a factory. I followed a shift, clocking in, working eight hours on a machine and producing my quota. I didn’t like it then, but I realized later I learned a precious lesson. I learned how many people earn their keep, doing what they dislike, hating the people they work for, cursing the system that reduces them to cogs in a machine.

I know now that the lesson applies to many places beyond a factory. I flaunted elegant suits and ties in many offices, but the appearance belied the brutal work pace. Thanks to tech wizardry that can now monitor every employee’s every second, the pace in many places is today breathless and ruthless. If you work in those impressive looking offices, you better keep running all the time, or someone will soon run you out the door. Your mobile is their leash, and, like a pet, you can’t ever ignore its call – or the command Big Brother gives you. If you get a free breakfast, the idea is to lure you to your desk earlier, and if you get free coffee, it is to keep you awake at your yoke longer.
 
I was recently in major hospitals for five surgeries. Hospitals are big business these days that bring in big money. They run exactly like factories, where patients are processed like raw material, added medicines and subtracted malignancies, and quickly turned out at a handsome price. Surgical patients, for instance, don’t rest in rooms; marketable products, they are shunted from pre-op to post-op. Their ease and comfort are no concern; the doctors’ convenience is the priority. If you are late for an appointment, you are fined. If the doctor sees you after an hour, you count your blessing that he is not seeing you after two.
 
I have taught at a dozen universities and nothing distinguishes them from factories except their phony pretension that they are ennobling young minds. They are really in the business of selling, increasingly at higher prices, certificates that their students can use to get jobs. Thousands pass through their portals, much as boxes do through Amazon’s giant warehouses, and quickly forget what they acquired in their classes – though they cannot forget the debts they still have to pay. So dubious is the quality of the ‘processing’ students get that employers are getting leery. Google, where everybody wants to work, for instance, is reportedly considering totally ignoring educational certificates in hiring new interns.
 
I have limited direct knowledge of the media, but friends tell me they too operate factory-like these days, caring little for quality or human consideration, ruled pitilessly by the bean counters that insist on a sweat shop turning out the highest output at the lowest cost. So, one must be grateful for the dedicated journalist, author, composer or filmmaker who pursues a dream nevertheless at some cost and refuses to cow to the blockbuster mentality. I talk to actors in New York who seek opportunities on the stage or screen and hear horror stories how they are treated, often mistreated, when they are recruited, deployed or dismissed. Harvey Weinstein may be a colossal cad, but he is the template of a legion predators in the movie world.
 
The field of politics is of course the Wild West and it is no surprise that political parties have an increasing number of leaders with charges against them of intimidation, rape and armed assault. Studies show it is an upward trend, for it suits the criminals to have the protective garb of a legislator and it suits the parties to have candidates who pay their own way, doubtless with illicit cash. This too is an example of the input-output calculus of a factory: you input quantities of graft money to make larger quantities of unaccounted money, which too can be used to generate illicit cash galore. Some politicos wear as a badge of pride their astonishing facility in misusing and mistreating the foot soldiers who work for them.
 
The harsh, inhumane factory life I saw at the start of my career appears now to have infected the culture of many other walks of life. It is a culture of exploiting people, using them as subhuman tools for personal or organizational ends, often for money and more often for power. When wealth accumulates and men decay, Goldsmith warned us, the land not only fares ill it becomes a prey to “hastening ills,” a prelude to disaster.
 
Our offices, hospitals, universities and media don’t have to run like this, in a dehumanized fashion, caring little for human suffering or satisfaction. We can do better. Even our factories don’t have to be inhuman.
 
With all our experience and ingenuity, we can devise workplaces that are humane and match the human spirit. We don’t have to make things and offer services in a way that makes of human beings beasts of bondage and creatures of captivity. You don’t have to be alt-left to see the wisdom of Marx’s telling phrase ‘wage slaves.’ We should be able to run our life and society without shameful slavery.

She had a convertible and she drove fast. Her silver-blue car would streak through my neighborhood and raise eyebrows. She couldn’t care less.
 
She braked audibly in front of my doorstep and rang the bell insistently.
 
“It is a glorious day. Why are you wasting it indoors?” she demanded.
 
It was no use saying I had bills to pay and my accountant’s exigent letter to answer. She barely listened and then responded with an impatient shake of her long, unruly mien.
 
“You do that later. Now, you come with me.”
 
She hardly gave me the time to put on my shoes. As I tied the shoestrings, she brushed her hair and answered mail on her phone, both at the same time.

It was indeed a bright day. Diane whizzed past the city streets and headed toward Frederic in the north. Passing a shopping mall, she stopped and said, “I’ll pick up a couple of lemonades. We may get thirsty on the way.”
 
As she stopped, I noticed a liquor store next door. “I finished my bottle of Campari last night,” I said. “Why not I pick up a bottle why you buy the lemonade?”
 
It was a large store, and they had a few items on sale. A bottle of Absolut vodka caught my eye and I took it too. As I placed the bottles on the counter, the salesman said, “Sir, we have some gin too on heavy discount.” I nodded and paid.
 
A few miles ahead we were past the city traffic and Diane pressed on the pedal. The cool breeze hit my face. It was agreeable to be out of the city and its noise and grime. Life seemed very pleasant and peaceful.
 
Just then we both heard the siren, the police signal. A police car was following us with flashing lights. Disgusted, Diane muttered, “What’s this? I certainly wasn’t speeding.”
 
She stopped the car. The police car stopped right behind us. The cop took his time checking our number on his computer before he came to ask for our driving license.
 
More checking and then he came to the window with the strange message, “There is the report of a stolen vehicle.”
 
Aghast, Diane replied, “I have had this car for three years. It has never been stolen.”
 
The cop looked at me and asked, “Who is that man?”
 
“My friend. He has nothing to do with my car.”
 
The cop went back to his car for more checking. Then he returned, a little abashed, and said, “I am sorry. There was a mistake about the number of the vehicle. Apologies for stopping you.”
 
Hardly had he spoken when he noticed the bottles that had rolled out of the paper bag on the back seat.
 
“Do you realize that it is against the law to transport liquor bottles from one state to another?”
 
I spoke up, “I am not transporting anything across state lines. I saw some liquor being sold at discount and bought them for my own use. They are going home with me when we return from our trip.”
 
The cop looked askance and examined the paper bag gingerly. He realized there were only three bottles, hardly the stuff for a major commercial transaction. He let us go.
 
The last word was of course Diane’s. When the cop left and the car started again, Diane heaved a noticeable sigh and asked, “Did you really have to buy so many bottles?”
 
I maintained a discreet silence.
 
We had a pleasant time in Frederick. We went to a small museum and then we had an excellent lunch in a cozy pint-sized family-run restaurant.

​Diane drove us back uneventfully to my home. We were both tired and I made a cocktail for us to revive our spirit.
 
She took a look at her glass and asked suspiciously, “What is this stuff?”
 
I replied, “It is called a Poor Man’s Vodka Martini. It has only ginger ale and vodka – the vodka that we took across state lines but, unwisely, did not sell for profit but brought back for our own delectation.”

Ajit died four weeks ago.
 
Amar, a common friend, wrote last week to say that Ajit had succumbed to the insidious cancer that was preying on his lungs.
 
Ajit belonged to the generation that did not own a computer or was not comfortable with it. That made regular contact from abroad awkward. The last time I called him, he could barely talk. I surmised then that his condition had deteriorated. He said, “My days are numbered.” The curtain came down shortly after that.
 
Ajit was always slight, recently slighter. With the advantage of a suave voice, he spoke clearly but gently. There was often a touch of humor in his choice of words. If unaccustomed, you might think he was mocking you, but it was his oblique way of kidding you. You knew it from his radiant smile. He was a friend and he let us feel the warmth of his friendship.

​We were in school together. We were just kids. As with Amar, we bonded together in utter candor, in a way we adults don’t seem to be able now. We had nothing to gain or lose; we just wanted to be with each other and bask in the pleasure of camaraderie. We enjoyed talking, joking, laughing, commiserating with each other. We supported and sustained each other, without knowing that we were doing so.
 
That memory endured even as we separated after school and went in different directions. As we aged, we acquired experience and wrinkles. We added lines to our face, but that was perhaps just a mask we sported. Probably we didn’t change all that much. Our boyhood links remained important to us. Were I in town on rare occasions, we would try to get together.
 
Mukul was the great organizer among us. He would invite us to his home or his club and we would gather and share stories. He had a large heart and a raucous laughter. He would initiate a story about our school days, a temperamental teacher or a classmate’s contretemps, and we would join in with our own weird and wonderful recollections. Those didn’t have to be the best days of our life, but they were certainly memorable.
More, those were our precious links. Our lives might be distinct, even our lifestyles might be very different, but we had a treasure house of memories in common, a bond of ineffable affection that bound us together.
 
What did this pool of memory mean to us?
 
Mukul once said to me, “I run a business where seldom things go the way I want them to go. Even in my family life unexpected things happen. These aren’t always pleasant. But those days, when we reveled in one another’s company, were golden. Not because they were perfect, but because I remember the perfect parts. Friends were those parts.”
 
He touched a chord in my heart. I go around the world in my work and in my search for what I am not sure of. I encounter fun and fury, hurt and happiness. I make and break relations. I find strange, unexpected things and maybe I find a little of myself. I realize more and more that I don’t realize much. I am just a wayward schoolboy in quest of something that I am not sure of.
 
But whatever I do and wherever I am, I need a helping hand. A word of support and a gesture of affection. I need to know someone somewhere cares a little for me. Someone gives a damn whether I live or die.
 
Our small circle of friends in school, now steadily getting smaller, was a charmed circle. The nexus was the purest gold of friendship. We just liked to be with the others. That experience sustained us then. The memory of it sustains us still.
 
Last year Mukul was to visit me in Washington. I did a spring-cleaning of my messy home in anticipation. He never came: his pancreas gave way just two weeks before the day of his flight.
 
And, now, Ajit too is gone. Leaving a trail of unspoken words and unshared thoughts.
 
I know my days are numbered too. I live in exile, dreaming of the day I will walk again on the streets of my childhood town, in heat and grime, breathing unaccustomed air, bleary eyed and baffled at the changed landscape, looking at strangers’ faces and thinking of the friends I have known and lost.
 
And cherishing the ones that remain. 

Birubabu was the gatekeeper in my school. He was a middle-aged thin-bone person, with a lean face adorned with the faint suggestion of a moustache. He lived in a tiny room of the headmaster’s cottage next to the school. I don’t know why he was called the gatekeeper, for opening the school gates in the morning and closing them at night seemed the least of his chores. He was really the headmaster’s gofer, running all kinds of errands, from bringing in a new blackboard to taking money – the school’s meager earnings – to the bank. Gatekeeper still was his official title, allowing the headmaster no doubt to retain him at the lowest wage.
 
You could infer the latter from his perpetually soiled shirt and tattered trousers. We of course paid him no notice, had no reason to. He did not make an appealing sight and insignificance was writ large on his face. Through a corner of the eye I had periodically seen him clean a corridor or bring in a supply of chalk to our class.
 
It changed the day I was not feeling well, and the teacher allowed me to go home. Somebody called my father, who was to come and fetch me. While I waited, feeling sick, in the scorching midday sun, Birubabu appeared from nowhere.
 
“You don’t look well,” he said, “you shouldn’t stand in the sun.”
 
“I am waiting for my father. He will come and get me.”
 
“You better wait in the shade. I will tell your father when he comes.” He added, “Come with me.”
 
He escorted me to what I later learned was his room. He poured a glass of water for me and then left to look out for my father.
 
It was a minuscule room, perhaps once used as a storage area. There was a cot, a small cupboard and a modest desk with a frayed rattan chair where I sat. Little else.
 
Very incongruously, right next to the bed was a cheap but rather large bookshelf. It was packed with books. I wasn’t feeling well at all, but my curiosity overcame my indisposition.

​My first glance told me that the books were all old and shopworn, doubtless all used and discarded ones. The second and closer glance surprised me. They were almost all books of poetry. Most were Bengali poets, old and young; a few were in English, including a two-volume anthology of European poetry. A school gatekeeper and poetry!
 
I was greatly astonished. Though I was a bookworm I seldom touched a book of poems. It seemed less connected to life than the stories and novels I read, something airy-fairy, and I avoided it. Now I had to reason to rethink.
 
I was in bed the next three days, but I could not get the gatekeeper’s collection of poetry out of my mind. I mentioned it to both my father and mother, and they said something I still remember: it is unwise to judge people by how they look or what they do.
 
My curiosity remained and Birubabu seemed a man of mystery. The following week I went up to him at the school gates to thank him for his kindness. Hesitantly, I broached the subject of his book collection. He paused for a moment, then said very simply, “Poems help me.”
 
We moved homes the following year and I went to a different school. I had new friends and new interests. Tentatively, I began to read poetry. Modern poetry, which at first seemed obscure and bizarre, started to make sense. I realized one understands nothing of a language unless one immerses in its poetry. Some poets became icons of my life.
 
Five years later I went back to my old school, which now had a new young headmaster. The school no longer had a gatekeeper, he told me. The groundskeeper opened the school gates in the morning and closed them in the evening.
 
When I mentioned Birubabu, the headmaster narrated an unexpected account. Birendra Sanyal was earlier a teacher in a private school in another state. When he came to Kolkata, he didn’t find a job and was forced to take a job as a gatekeeper. He left after three years without leaving a forwarding address. The headmaster had heard the rumor that he now works for a newspaper in another town and writes poetry under a pseudonym.
 
What was not a rumor was the fact that I was the eighth alumnus who had come to him to ask about Birubabu. All had a special memory of the man and an act of kindness to report. All remembered the scruffy thin-boned soiled-shirt man with fondness and gratitude.
 
An act of kindness? Sure. But I had a larger debt to own: the immense, immemorial, inscrutable beauty of poetry. Poems help me too.

I remember how it irritated me to receive missives from my old aunt saying, “Don’t you ever think of me? Why don’t you write me?”
 
I had arrived in Washington on a bright summer day. Essentially as a pauper, for the rules then meant I couldn’t convert my savings into dollars. I had left a well-paid job, a company gifted car and a luxury apartment I owned.
 
In steady sequence I found a job, first with a big company and then with a UN group, and bought a home in the suburb and then in the city. It did not come easy. Long hours, demanding work, learning fast on my feet. And making do with less sleep. It is tough being a migrant in a vastly different land.
 
And then to receive a plaint that I wasn’t writing enough letters! How thoughtless!
 
Now I know I did not understand.

​I was a fool to misread her message. She wasn’t saying that I did not write enough letters. She was saying she loved me. She was saying she missed me. She wanted to hear from me because she cared a lot for me. It wasn’t a complaint. It was a declaration of love.

​It makes me ashamed to think that what should have made me weep with joy only annoyed me. I was too preoccupied with my work, my new life, my quotidian cares to decipher a loving message.
 
It horrifies me to think of how often heartfelt messages like this are misread. We are all different people, with different ways of expressing ourselves. We are men and women, with backgrounds of many kinds and understanding at many levels. Simple words are misunderstood, words of concern cause unintended hurt.

Now that I live far away from my friends and relations, we connect through mail and talk. Do my brothers know how much I love them? Do my nephews and nieces, some very talented, realize how much I miss them? Do friends and readers who write to me, often very supportively, know how much I prize them? For a wordsmith, I feel inept in the tangled web of messages and fear I am doing a poor job. Those links are golden for a man in exile.
 
Even those who are near us, the people we see and talk to more easily, are often mysteriously difficult to connect with. My friends tell me how hard it is often to understand their children. They seem distant, their preferences seem incomprehensible.
 
My friend Deben says, “What I see as a gesture of help, my children see as a move of intrusion. What is meant as a word of friendly counsel, is heard as gratuitous and unwelcome advice.”
 
His wife Neera added, “When I buy things for them, those lie unused in their storage. Any suggestion I make about their home, their work or their children, is rebuffed. They seem to speak the same language, but not really.”
 
I have two loving and thoughtful daughters. They live in a faraway city but take pains to call and check on their strange father who seems to put a lot of value on books and papers, ideas and research, and disappears periodically in other lands. When I sit and eat alone, I remember the time Lina asked me to return home early and served me an artfully grilled salmon. I remember too when Monica invited to the small apartment she had as a student and served me poached eggs for breakfast. As I shave, I think of the time, further down, Monica asked me why she can’t shave. As I shower, I recall Lina’s curiosity about using the bathtub instead. My mind even races back to the days they ran about our home as toddlers, drew pictures and scribbled on walls with crayons.
 
They are grown up now, young women whose life has been quite different from their dad’s. I remind myself that they are apt to think differently and value different things. It is a pleasure still to find we have a few things in common to admire or to detest. I am not sure we understand each other fully each time. Nor are they. But I am relieved and happy that we talk and find a couple of things to agree on. I believe they know that I love them, but of course, like all children, they will never grasp the full extent what they mean to me. They may not even believe, were I to tell them, that my life would have been rather desolate without their magnetic presence.
 
I hope I am learning. I am trying to avoid the mistake I made with my aunt. Nothing that I ever did was more important than her affection. Little that I ever achieved was worthier than the love that anyone ever, undeservedly, bestowed on me.
 
Too late and too little, I miss my irritating aunt.