My parents were rather different characters – in retrospect, it seems a miracle they got on so well together – and I suspect I inherited two distinct features: my gregariousness from my exceedingly social father and my admiration for precision from my scrupulous mother.
 
I remember an exchange between them, not because it was memorable but because it concerned me and the effect was longer-lasting than I could anticipate. It had to do with my admission to a new school, following our move to a new home in a different locale.
 
Father (with great satisfaction): I took Manish to the new school and got him admitted. Everything went very well.
 
I noticed that he left out the part about his long chat with the Assistant Headmaster about tennis and the three cups of tea he savored with him.
 
Mother: I hope you took all the papers from the old school I asked you to take with you.
 
Father: Actually, I forgot. But they didn’t need any of those. They gave our son a test and he apparently did well. He was admitted right away.
 
Mother: I hope you spelled his name right (father’s interjection, “Of course, I did”) and didn’t make a mistake about his date and place of birth.
 
Father: You think I am going to make a mistake about my own son! Certainly not.
 
And then he made the mistake of saying the place and date of birth. The first was right, the second was not; he had cited the next year. Mother’s face went grave.
 
Mother: How could you be so forgetful! (Then, the most damning thing a wife can say to a husband) I should have gone to the school myself.
 
Father looked mortified and quite repentant.
 
I am told he tried to get the date changed in the following weeks and had little success. It mattered little. My official and false birthdate rolled over from school to college, to university, and to organizations where I worked.
 
Until the day my wife, an American, asked for a visa for me to travel to the US where she worked. I received from the local consulate a large form and the demand for several documents, the principal being a birth certificate. When I explained that I did not have such a certificate, like many Indians born in smaller towns, and the Supreme Court had ruled that the school leaving certificate should be the age determiner, a young bureaucrat demanded that I get a hospital certificate stating that my birth was not registered. The demand was based on the heroic and totally unrealistic assumption that the hospital would go back four decades to check whether I was born in its premises. They would also have to research whether the birth was officially registered and a certificate issued. Still, I wrote to a friend, a distinguished lawyer in Nagpur, my birthplace, if anything could be done.

My wife, a diplomat, decided to use Yankee ingenuity instead of diplomatic finesse and approached a sympathetic and powerful senator from her district. The old man called the local consulate and insisted on immediate action. The next day, the consul received me personally and practically filled up the form himself. Wherever a needed document, such as the birth certificate, was missing, he authorized exemption and signed. All I did was to add my signature and thank him. I could not resist the temptation to suggest, to his irritation, that visa officers needed to be realistic about country conditions in seeking documentation. The visa arrived by a courier the same evening.

​Three weeks later, as I was leaving for Washington, I had a letter from my friend, the lawyer in Nagpur. Attached was a certificate from the hospital saying that my birth was not registered on the specific date and no certificate was issued. More interesting was the letter, which said, “Attached is the certificate saying that your birth was not registered on the given date” and went on to add, “If you want, I can also send you a birth certificate saying that your birth was registered on that date – or any other date of your choice.” So much for the value of documents.
 
Any day now, as I finish my unimpressive but enjoyable sojourn on this earth and arrive at the Pearly Gate, I bet I will be peremptorily interrogated – as everywhere else – about my date and place of birth. The place I can confidently say, but a huge problem faces me about the date. If I cite the date of birth now noted in every august institution where I worked (and recorded in every dismal document certifying my education, health, insurance, marital status, even mental competence), I would really be lying and be condemned to a lowly circle of hell. Were I to cite the true date, a year antecedent, I could not prove it, nobody would believe me, and I might end up in the same nasty place.

Every time I hear someone cite the Maimonedis adage “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” I feel like saying, “Better still, teach him to read and he can teach himself how to fish and do a thousand other things.” He can go on to YouTube and Coursera and a million illustrated books and learn how to speak Serbo-Croatian, play the harpsichord and cook a gourmet French dinner.
 
I am a fanatic on the subject of learning and, therefore, of reading. I came from a low-income middle-class family and knew that I needed to read and learn if I wanted to get anywhere. I developed a love for reading but discovered that books were hard to get in the city I lived in. Kolkata was painfully short of decent libraries.
 
The smartest idea I had was to start a library of our own. I was in high school and I talked with a classmate who too loved to read. We had already exchanged books: I had lent him the novels I had at home, two at a time, and he had reciprocated from his collection. Why didn’t we extend the scope, I told Prasanta, join with a bunch of our friends, pool all our books and start a library that all of us can use. We would have a much richer collection, which could get richer if we continued to expand the circle. Prasanta promised to think about it.
 
He did more. He returned the following week with a grander idea. Prasanta was from an affluent business family and lived in a large, three-story house. He said he had persuaded his father to let us have a room on the ground floor, free, for the purpose. This meant we had a place where scores of books could be safely kept, and several people could come and make use of the library.
 
We talked some more and expanded the idea. With space available, we could admit a larger number of members, not just our friends, but also some young people from the locality, which would help augment our collection. Further, we would institute a small monthly fee, which would help us buy more books to attract even more members.
 
The six pioneers gathered in the allotted room, cleaned it, put up shelves, added a few chairs, and started two folders with records of acquisitions and the daily transactions of books lent and returned. With modest fanfare, with cups of tea for all of us, a library started the following week.

We had to have a name and Prasanta suggested Sarat Pathagar, in honor of Saratchandra the novelist. Though second to none in my admiration of Saratchandra – rereading him thirty years later I still thought he was a master storyteller – I was averse to hero-worship and would have preferred a name that characterized our little library, but I went along with the general mood. I liked the literalness of Pathagar, a place to read.

​The place was a half-hour walk from my home and it became a place of both comfort and stimulation. I could browse through books, something I could not do in my school (or even later in my college or university), and leafed through widely varied books that excited me. We had started with the idea of stocking novels and short stories, but members donated other kinds of books that I found a source of excitement. Somebody donated an illustrated book on astronomy, which she was allowed to do instead of the membership fee for a month or two.
 
Very quickly, it also became a meeting place of friends, many of whom liked the idea of sitting and chatting surrounded by a mountain of books and a sense of purpose. The very place induced us to talk about books we had read or wanted to read. We talked about what the books meant to us. As we talked about what we liked and what we didn’t, we went deeper and deeper into the content of the books. I remember, as we talked about the novels of Saratchandra, we argued vigorously about the role of women and what social customs put cruel restraints on them. The library helped teach us what our schools sadly failed to make us aware.
 
Prasanta, who had ambitions to teach someday, told me, “As a child, I heard from others and felt myself that learning anything is an unpleasant chore. When I started reading the literature, I found the opposite: learning can be fun. School is seldom fun. A library is always fun.”
 
We were proud we had created a library that made it fun for others too. When we went to college, we handed over the charge to others, but the library continued. I felt I had accomplished something worthwhile.
 
In years, I went on to study a ‘dismal science’ in a well-known college, but my undying love of literature and analytical thinking was nurtured in a modest room in Prasanta’s home, in the company of earnest fellow travelers who cared about books and loved to talk about literature. And Prasanta, to the great discomfiture of his businessman father and businessmen brothers, defiantly went on to study literature in the same college and in time became a professor and wrote the most astounding authoritative biography of Rabindranath.

Ever since I saw, possibly at the age of seven, a historical play, Chandragupta, enacted hammily in the school theater, I have been mesmerized by the stage. Unlike most people, I love to read plays and, of course, I enjoy seeing them on the stage. I was marginally involved with movies, but with plays I have had a closer link. Besides being a steady spectator, both in India and the US, I have been occasionally a drama critic and, in the distant past, both a stage manager and an actor. Because I was friends with them, the actors in the Bengali and Hindi plays strong-armed me sometimes into taking roles and I have no doubt that the choice had more to do with camaraderie than competence.
 
More interesting though is how I came to act in a French play. Professor Satyen Bose, besides being a great physicist, was also an acutely observant man, and it had not escaped his attention that I was regularly abstracting French novels from his library. They were invariably English translations. He accosted me, “If you like French literature so much, why don’t you learn French?” That planted an ambition in my head, and I joined the Alliance Francaise in Kolkata.
 
It was next door to my office, and I spent hours there beyond my lessons. I quickly found the institution, like some other teaching organizations, somewhat insensitive to students’ interests. I made several suggestions and representations, including to the director, to no avail. The members of the governing board were never seen, let alone found talking to the students – except when they came for parties. I took a radical decision. I stood as a candidate for the Alliance governing body in the next election. A well-known French scholar and his Gallic wife (whom I had marginally assisted in subtitling a Satyajit Ray movie) endorsed me officially.
 
All hell broke loose. Lady Ranu Mukherjee, who chaired the board, sent word that students are better suited to classes than the governing board. Pahari Sanyal, the popular actor, and Ila Dutt, sister of my admired poet Sudhindranath Datta, both close friends of the chairperson and board members, invited me for lunch and dissuaded me from my foolhardy venture, saying I had no chance of winning the requisite votes. They guessed wrong.
 
In the election two weeks later, I won the largest number of votes, outrunning all the others by quite a margin. I had simply taken a list of Alliance members and called and talked to practically all of them – which no board member had ever done. Lady Ranu Mukherjee changed her mind, called me the ‘youngest and bravest’ member and ordered champagne bottles to be opened.      
 
That began my long innings at the Alliance Francaise and, when the invitation came to act in a French play about to be staged, I could hardly refuse. The play was Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in which a small town in France finds its people, one by one, unaccountably turning into rhinos. Some doubt and dither, but they all eventually succumb to the change and become rhinos, until it is a complete tide of transformation – with the sole exception of a drunken, disorderly man who holds on tenuously to his humanity.

​The play has the semblance of a comical affair, but it is really a powerful parable of human frailty that, looking back, I feel has profound lessons today for many countries, such as USA and India, Brazil and Turkey, Hungary and Philippines. It raises the troubling question: why do good people go along so often with an evil dispensation and choose bestiality over humanity? When inhumanity triumphs, we should probably turn to Ionesco for a clue.
 
Some go along with evil, because like Madame Boeuf they love the perpetrators. She literally rides a rhino. Some like the upright Jean argue vocally against evil, but, when the time comes, find themselves helplessly drawn to it. Some like the housewife complain about the depredations of evil, like the trampling of a pet cat, but then find it advantageous to keep quiet. Bureaucrats like tough Papillon and sensitive Dudar soon realize which side of their bread is buttered and join the big beasts. Some like the firemen, earnest workers all, begin to see the convenience of change and become a crash of rhinos. Even the sweet Daisy repudiates her heart, on the paradoxical premise that her lover does not understand love, for he does not follow the trend and choose to be a rhino. Finally, the entire town folk becomes a huge herd of rhinos, big, strong animals, shedding every vestige of their humanity. The sway of evil is absolute. Only one person, Berenger, a weak man addicted to drinks, from whom we expect the least, decides to be a firm holdout and never become a rhino.
 
In the play I had the innocent-looking but crypto-destructive role of Logician, a man who uses his specious syllogisms to justify whatever conclusions he finds it convenient to advance at any moment, however perverse his reasons are. I am sure we all know some clever, cultivated people Ionesco would happily identify with that character.  

Ordinary people are not important, we learn from childhood. We are taught to admire kings and presidents, generals and politicos, big bureaucrats and bigger bosses, movie stars and sports champions. No matter that many of them are undeserving, who got to be where they are because they are the children of bosses and generals and movie stars or other rich and privileged people. They had advantages and opportunities ordinary people dream of but seldom have – barring an extraordinary fluke.
 
Ordinary people are the people who serve us. Our cooks, gardeners, handymen, cleaners, chauffeurs, plumbers, home aides, nannies who turn up at dawn to do our chores and disappear at dusk to rest in a princely hovel in a royal slum. Sometimes they are served a repast in their place of work, which they consume solely, silently huddled in some corner or they slink to a street vendor to buy the cheapest meal available. We call them when we need them; otherwise they are practically invisible, nearly indistinguishable from the pantry wall or garage corner.
 
At last comes a monstrous, unreasonable pandemic, if not to make these hapless creatures fully visible, at least to make us sense their absence by the lack of their service. Our commodes are not sparkling clean; ours cars don’t take us, at the merest bidding, to the consoling whisky at our dearest club; warm chapatis don’t greet us at any hour of the day or night at our peremptory wish-as-command. It is nothing if not annoying to find that chores that we have long shunted to lower beings have to be undertaken by us, if only to protect us from their dirty, potentially infectious fingers. We have to pour gasoline in our cars and drive them ourselves and we have to cook daybreak to dusk, though less opulent meals.

I understand this well, for I grew up in India and cannot recall a day without encountering one from a long procession of domestic employees, who were brazenly called servants. There was Keshab the soft-spoken gardener from Odissa (working ironically in our house on a street named after Keshab Sen), Aziz the tall cook with a salt-and-pepper goatee, Bijan the tall gofer who dubbed anyone who did not speak his language a ‘foreigner,’ Molina who came to help mother when she took a job and cooked bizarre and horrid meals, Abdul the maintenance man who became very fond of my younger brother and turned into a male nanny, but two endure most in my memory.
 
​Karunadi came to work with us when we were young and father insisted that we address her as an elder sister. She was a child widow and had possibly never had a solitary joyful day in her life. She was pleasantly startled when we treated her as a family member. She was proud of her own room and undertook to learn even the few exotic dishes mother had acquired from her British friends and tried periodically on us. Her great satisfaction was when we said that she had done better than mother. We grew extremely fond of her, and  mother insisted on starting a savings bank account for her besides her monthly pay. My parents wanted her to have a safety net for her later years, but Karunadi showed scant financial sense: she withdrew her entire saving to help a glib nephew start a dubious business. Years later we heard the business had folded and we wondered if Karunadi got anything out of it.
 
Banamali worked for me when I was a young executive and lived in a large airy split-level bungalow. I had little interest in household affairs and Banamali took full charge. He was a slim, clean-shaven, articulate, good-looking man and promptly became the hero of all the maidservants of the neighboring houses. Their employers complained to me and were irritated when I responded that Banamali never advised me about my life and it would be invidious of me to advise him about his. His charm was unquestionable. My girlfriends were invariably enamored of him and one, a pretty, long-haired actress, when asked by a colleague whether she had any serious intent about me, went to the length of saying that she would rather consider Banamali as a groom. Banamali proved his worth in managerial skills; he later took a good job as a kitchen supervisor with a large company. Of his amatory skills, I failed to gather further details.
 
I did not feel comfortable the way most employers treated their domestic employees. I do not feel comfortable now. For less well-heeled middle-class people, it may not be easy provide many comforts to their employees. But human dignity, which any person would be entitled to expect of another, should not be that difficult to extend. The current code of conduct seems unfortunately to be a holdover from an earlier medieval era, which is a dispensable relic in our time. When a society declares a lock-down at a few hours’ notice, without a moment’s thought about thousands of day laborers who live hand-to-mouth, it reflects a brutal thoughtlessness impermissible in a caring land. It reflects a broad mindset of taking ordinary people for granted, as beasts of burden who will silently hew wood and draw water as necessary, but who can be sacrificed at a moment’s notice without compunction.
 
But the current long-lasting crisis has brought home the lesson that such inhumanity exacts a price too. The relationship of trust between the server and the served has eroded in many homes and quite severed in others. It is a loss unlikely to be quickly recovered.

He was a famous writer and he had agreed to meet me, a nobody.
 
I had no illusions: he had consented to receive me only because his close friends had warmly recommended me. Tarun and Dipanwita Roy were celebrated figures on the stage and Tarun was an accomplished playwright too. We had an easy bridge: they loved talking about the stage and I loved talking about plays I had read, from Aristophanes to Zola. We had become friends. They knew of my translation of contemporary writers and suggested I see their friend, the author.
 
I arrived on time and he opened the door to his sparse apartment. He was a small elderly bespectacled man, quick in his movements and precise in his words. He didn’t smile, though he sounded cordial, and pointed to a weather-beaten but comfortable chair. He left me for a moment to make some tea, and returned with two cups, and sat down with an expectant look.

I looked at a man I had long wanted to see. As a kid, I was enthralled by his children’s stories; as an adolescent, I had admired his stories and novels. All his prose – and even the large body of his poetry – had a couple of distinct features. He made a uniquely sparkling, highly disciplined use of words, which wasn’t common in Bengali literature. He crafted beautiful formal phrases, yet they flowed with charmingly informal ease. The other was an unusual, underlying flavor of exotic lands, highly unusual for an author who had never stepped outside India (bar a short, solitary visit to Belgium, to receive an honor). He was to tell me later that he had traveled eagerly and extensively in India, which had prompted him to travel to unusual places mentally, aided by a large collection of travel books.

Now he sat facing me, a cup of tea in hand, looking intently at the folder in my hand, “Tarun Roy told me that you have translated a story and want me to approve its publication.”
 
I had translated a story about a young couple in a troubled relationship who suddenly experience a severe earthquake in their home that wrecks many things in the house but fosters a new, tender bond between them – alas, only for a few minutes, for, as the quaking stops shortly, their relationship returns to an earlier precarious state.
 
I said, “I want to show you the translation, of course, but before that I have a confession to make.”
 
He frowned as I continued, “I have taken a small liberty in my translation in one place.” I mentioned the place in the story and added, “In the printed version that I have used, the sentence is shown as a statement from the husband. I felt the statement was a little invidious and slightly incongruous with the husband’s character. I thought the sentence would be better as an unexpressed thought of the husband. I have translated it accordingly.”
 
He asked, “What version have you used?”
 
I showed him the book, a potpourri of modern Bengali short stories.
 
Suddenly, his stern face dissolved in a broad smile, “Let me tell you something. When I first wrote that story for a magazine many years ago, that sentence was a thought, not a statement. Clearly, the editor of this collection hasn’t taken the pain to reproduce the story correctly.”     
 
He got up. “Let me make you another cup of tea,” he said, “You deserve it.”
 
Over the second cup of tea came his welcome declaration, “Tarun has told me you write well. If you have read my story carefully enough to spot a mistake like that, I don’t need to check your translation. You can go ahead with it. Or any other translation.”
 
The tea now tasted better. I told him frankly that his mastery of words made his works not easy to translate, though translated they should be. Both because they were superb and expressed human values that would resonate with readers everywhere. He smiled modestly. I met him a few more times, also about further translations. He was unfailingly warm and helpful. I retain the memory of an incisive author who wore his fame lightly and was gracious to an unfamiliar nobody.
 
Last month was the anniversary of Premendra Mitra’s death. I have been re-reading his stories, now conveniently collected in two complete volumes and presentably published by Dey’s. It gives me again the extraordinary pleasure of reading some finely honed tales of a superlative master (though one stumbles over copious print errors of spelling and punctuation). He had written his first story, a story of love, when he accidentally encountered an old, soiled postcard from a wife to her migrant husband, and then continued writing when he felt somebody needed to tell the stories of myriad ordinary people. As I burn the midnight oil, I embark with Mitra on a strange odyssey, of men and women, rich and poor, simple and cultivated, city slickers and village housewives, angry young women and gentle older folk, urbane professors and gentle clerks, walking the winding roads of a metropolis or riding a bullock cart in the countryside, laboring, struggling, loving, suffering, and singing the imperishable song of undiminished life.

Some say it is not a good time for older people.
 
It was perhaps never a good time for older people. You sense daily your waning strength; you cannot do now what you did, often easily, at other times. You cannot lift a packed suitcase or walk up four flights of stairs. Even to unscrew a tight-lid medicine bottle you have to swallow your pride and beg the nearest youngster.
 
The humiliation does not stop there. Even your mind plays tricks with you. Forget about reciting the poem that you knew so well. You might start well, but experience has taught you that you will invariably stumble and forget some key lines. Invariably and embarrassingly, you forget the name of your nephew’s tall wife, the one who wears a shiny nose-pin. Sometimes even the nephew’s name eludes you.

​Yes, you have already lived ten years more than your father did, and, Heaven knows, you are in good enough shape to last another ten. Especially if you continue to gobble the eighteen tablets the doctor wants you to take. It isn’t such an enticing prospect when you remember that your urologist has warned of approaching incontinence and your dentist has twice talked of a couple of costly implants.
 
That cost business has real terror. You worked all your life, for what you thought was a decent wage. Nobody told you that what you earned and laid by would amount to a pittance in a few years. Your children laugh when they hear of your piddling accounts and what your life insurance policy is worth now. Once you pay the rental – for the same puny apartment you now pay three times what you started paying – you can barely cover your food bill and the occasional taxi fare.
 
You walk carefully, for you know that if you were to slip and fall, you have to turn to your children for what medical bills cost now. They are kind and helpful, but kindness can be tiresome after a while and you don’t care to be a help-seeking supplicant any time. You love your children and you appreciate them. But you know well they belong to a different generation, with very different priorities. Looking after an aging parent occurs somewhere on their to-do list, but surely not at the top. You understand. Competition is fierce and demands on their time intense.
Also, they speak a different language, almost as if they belong to another world. You have tried, occasionally, tentatively, to hint at the void you sometimes feel and you have realized quickly that you were coming up against a wall. They would like to be of help, but they have no time. You would have liked them to explain an item in the newspaper that caught your attention or to help with a problem on your computer, but they rarely have the time to spare. They may quickly say a few things, but you may not understand, and you would prefer to give up than seem to be badgering them.
 
Essentially, you are on your own. One of your wisecracking friends used to say, “Aging is not nice, but the alternative is no better.” Yes, you are mercifully alive, which many of your friends are not. So many, your closest friends, have moved on; those that remain are often unwell, not quite mobile, or inaccessible to sensible conversation. It is good to survive, but not so good when the people you knew or cared for have not. There are few to talk to and nobody to talk with.
 
You don’t look at the mirror as often as you did earlier, but when you do you have to reckon with the aged face you see: a lined visage, an old scar or two, graying temples, hooded eyes. You are not the robust man you looked in yesteryears. You try to stride, without a stoop, and manage to achieve a relaxed but respectable gait. Yes, whatever the thoughts that gnaw at you, you are still quite a person, of poise and polish.
 
No, you don’t feel old at all. Strangely, you sense the person you have always believed yourself to be, sitting right there within you, watching, understanding, growing quietly. And as steadily as when you sat at a school desk and learned mathematics, or stood in a college hall and listened to a student politician. Or labored at your office desk in the beige hall and answered endless service calls.
 
No, you are not old, however the years may have furrowed your face, sapped your energy, dimmed your eyes, enlarged your prostate or robbed the value of your savings. You are alive, you are active, you have the grip of your world, you are taking in everything that is happening around you, you are making sense of the universe. You are a full human being, worthy and valuable, at par with the rest of humanity, titled for respect.
 
Didn’t somebody say that “an old man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” only to remember to add, “unless soul clap its hands and sing – and louder sing – for every tatter in its mortal dress.” Sing, for Heaven’s sake, and sing the loudest you can.

Jay is alive, Dhruva is dead. Both are old friends, and both are lost to me.
 
I had joined the new school from another town and knew nobody in my class. Most of them had been together for two to four years and formed a tight-knit group. The fear of being in an unfamiliar school was coupled with the panic of being in a sea of unfamiliar faces. The moment the first recess started the first day, Dhruva was by my side. He said his name and asked mine. Then he said what I most wanted to hear: that he would be my friend. He added that he had four other close friends in the class and at the end of the day he wanted me to meet them.

Those four, I soon realized, were his closest buddies, but he was friendly with all the other classmates. Dhruva was a lively, gregarious person and had an easy way of building bridges with other people. He wasn’t a great sportsman, but he played soccer and cricket, and he enticed me to join the school’s cricket team. He proved to be an excellent team member, who could be depended on to raise our spirits, especially when we had to duel with a formidable team. Even the teachers recognized his special talent. When the students had to be persuaded to take a painful vaccine, the Assistant Headmaster came to the class and recruited Dhruva.

​We became good friends. Both of us lived near the school, and he would periodically visit me at home. I too started visiting him. His family was affluent, mine was not. It made no difference. His parents were very welcoming; his mother, in particular, made sure that I was well looked after when I visited. A cup of tea always came with sandwiches.
 
Jay was, in many ways, the opposite of Dhruva. He had a quiet warmth that took a little effort to uncover. He was in another school and I met him after a soccer match, in which I played with my usual ineptitude and Jay scored repeatedly against us and looked like Pelé. Others congratulated him, but he said little. Surprisingly, he spoke at some length when I asked how he had learned to play so well. He spoke of a cousin, a professional and a true martinet, who had taken the trouble to train him.
 
Once I got to know him better, his soccer skill was no surprise. Jay had a quality of doggedness that would make him succeed in anything he undertook. Of all my friends, I knew that if I had a problem and I shared it with Jay, there would be a solution in no time. He brought the same pertinacity to all his endeavors. He wasn’t ever regarded as brilliant, or even remarkably bright, but he did well in his studies. I saw it at close range when, two years later, he joined our school and started sitting next to me.
 
After school, our paths diverged, for Jay went to another college and Dhruva to an engineering institute. We saw little of one another for a couple of years, until they both returned to town with brand-new jobs. Dhruva impressed the interviewers and became a well-paid intern in a machine tools company. Jay taught briefly in a college and then found a reporter’s slot in a newspaper office. Dhruva was the same energetic, bubbly person as ever. He would turn up, without notice, in my office in the evening and insist that I join him for a glass of beer. Jay would periodically call me and tell me of his resolute, methodical search for stories and his scrupulous attention to verified details. At my insistence, he would sometimes turn up in my home for a cup of coffee but would rarely stay beyond an hour. Though very different, they remained precious friends whose company I enjoyed and friendship I treasured.
 
I went abroad and my two friends progressed well in their organization. Jay had acquired a sterling reputation as a journalist and Dhruva had started an engineering consulting firm. They had done well and, on a short visit to India, I invited a bunch of friends and made sure that they were included. Dhruva noticed my thinning hair and joked that it was the price I was paying for an overworked cerebrum and Jay shyly took me aside and handed my his newly published book of essays. I was proud of them and cherished our valued friendship which had lasted despite our remote orbits.
 
Three years ago, Dhruva wrote to say that he was visiting the US east coast as a member of a chamber of commerce delegation to explore business opportunities and would like to pass a weekend with me. I was thrilled and said he would be very welcome and started planning museum and resort trips. Three weeks later, the delegation leader called me from London to say Dhruva had developed cardiac problems on the flight and was hospitalized. His son, who had flown from India, informed me two days later, that Dhruva had breathed his last. His remains would be flown back to India. His family was kind and sent me his latest photograph, but I never saw Dhruva again.
 
I was upset and called friends, among them Jay. He is a very considerate person, and I was a little surprised at his reaction. Uncharacteristically, he sounded distant, his words seemed vague, almost jumbled. Five months later, I visited India and my first thought was to see him. His family sounded hesitant when I called, but I insisted on seeing my old friend soon. When I arrived, he came forward and held my hand, and that was the closest I came to him. I looked at him and his faraway look. He seemed to barely recognize me. His dementia had pushed him far away, to a place where I could not reach him. My friend, so dear and so close, was lost forever to me.

For years, I rose at crack of dawn and went to the College Square in Kolkata to swim. By six in the morning, I would be in the water.
 
College Square was a modest park in the heart of the city, with a large pool in the middle. It was close to the university and seven minutes to walk from our home. Every morning, our father, determined that his sons should be adept in water, marched us there to receive swimming instruction from an experienced coach. Soon we were floating and then swimming. Initially afraid of water, I began to enjoy it.
 
The coach would time us. It wasn’t good enough to swim from end to end in the pool. One had to do it in a progressively shorter time. For a couple of days, it was fun to go faster and faster and try to beat my brother and other swimmers. Then I lost interest. My focus was on Biman. Biman was an ace swimmer. What was most striking about him was not his speed, but his style. The way he swam was a work of art. He swam smoothly, elegantly, almost flashily. Nobody swam like him.
 
Biman reminded me of Johny Weissmuller. Johny was a champion swimmer who won an Olympic gold medal and set fifty world records in the thirties. Hollywood hired him to play Tarzan in a dozen films. When he had to swim in several sequences, the coach told him, I read, he might have been good enough for Olympics but was not good enough for Hollywood. His swimming style wasn’t ‘showy’ enough. He had to revise his swimming style. I felt Biman could be in a film of derring-do and I wanted to swim like him.
 
I never accomplished that, but I developed a half-way decent style. I also learned to swim a modest distance – modest compared to guys who crossed the English Channel. More important, I developed a lifelong love of water.
 
In a few years, I was in college. Then the College Square park became an attraction of a different kind. Around the pool was a walkway. One could go around and have a decent walk in a crowded town. Several men and women went to the park and walked around the water. Many singly, some in groups. It was a veritable meeting ground of several older folk, for whom free options for recreation were scarce.
 
It became a convenient place to go with friends and chat while we walked. We didn’t usually have the money to go to the coffee house or restaurants nearby. The park provided a good alternative. If we were lucky, we would even find a free bench to sit and talk.
 
Soon I found a way to make the acquaintance of a few female students in the college. The park became a lifesaver for the numerous occasions when I wanted to engage some bewitching coed in a friendly palaver but did not have a coin in my pocket. What could be simpler and more innocent than to suggest a gentle walk beside a stretch of water, especially in a public park where one could not execute disreputable designs? If one was lucky, there could even be an unoccupied bench in a quiet corner.

I even developed a conversational gambit. I promised the women that I would show them the legendary part of the park, where there was a wrestling ring and where the great female wrestler Hamida Banu bested her male contestants. She had declared that she would marry the strong man who could defeat her. Two giants, Baba Pahelwan of Baroda and the Sikh master Khadag Singh, had entered the ring and left losers -- and unwed – and now Bengal’s pride, Gobar Babu, offered a defiant Bengali challenge. Alas, Hamida threw the man unceremoniously out of the ring, crushing eastern India’s solitary hope and Gobar Babu’s celebrated career.

With that tragi-comic story, a loss for Bengal but a win for women, I had persuaded a winsome coed to accompany me to the park and we were, thank Heavens, comfortably settled on a quiet corner bench. As we started talking, an older man sauntered in and took a seat at the other end of our bench. My friend was telling me of her plan to visit Delhi during the summer vacation, when the old man butted in and said that it would be supremely unwise as the capital would be quite intolerable in summer. She replied her cousin’s home was airconditioned, but the man said cheekily Delhi’s streets weren’t.
 
My friend ignored the remark and continued talking. A few minutes later, she told of her ambition to become a doctor and was about to explain her choice of pediatrics, when the old man turned again and commented that women are better advised to be nurses than doctors. Incensed, my friends demanded heatedly why that was so, since there were many first-rate female doctors. The man said that, numbers notwithstanding, women were sentimental and unstable and unsuited to the medical profession. This infuriated my companion, who responded that men like him were unreasonable misogynists who stood in the way of progress. After that, the discussion descended swiftly into a tirade.
 
Needless to say, I didn’t have much of a chance to say anything to my classmate, let alone have a pleasant conversation or extract the promise of a second date. The College Square park had its attractions all right, but admittedly also some significant traps.