My wife was pregnant, with the baby’s arrival date getting closer. I wanted to make sure all the arrangements were in place. She chose a doctor she was comfortable with. The doctor chose the hospital he was comfortable with. I went to see the hospital and its arrangement for childbirth. I was in for a surprise.
 
It was a large hospital, well-known for its neonatal section. They readily agreed to show me around. There were other expectant couples and a young, agreeable nurse guided us and explained the process.
 
“You don’t have to look for a parking space when you come in,” she said, “you just leave your car in front of the section, in an earmarked space, and go in with the patient. After you complete the formalities, you go back and park it in the hospital parking lot.” That was very thoughtful.
 
“In the lobby,” she told me, “we will take charge of your wife while you do the paperwork. Then you join her in the birthing room where we will take her.”

​We went to the birthing room.
 
It was a pleasant medium-sized room with a window and diffuse lighting. I immediately liked the room.
 
“Here she can change into comfortable clothes, lie down and wait for the moment. A nurse will look after her and give her medicines. She will also monitor the contractions and know when to expect the baby. Depending on that, she will alert the doctor and request him or her to come.”
 
“May I stay in the birthing room with her?”
 
“Yes, you may.” That was reassuring.
 
“The nurse will keep monitoring your wife’s contractions. When we know that the time is right, we call the doctor and move the patient on to another bed and transfer her to the operation room. Let us go there.”
 
The operation room was the typical place for surgical procedures, with a stark, clinical look and aggressively bright lights. I disliked the place instantly.
 
I asked, “Let me get this straight. When my wife is in the most critical stage, the contractions are coming rapidly one after another, that is the time you will force her to get out of her bed, transfer to another bed and move her to this brightly-lit room, in order to have her baby? Why?”
 
“Because we do it that way. We have here all the equipment for an emergency.”
 
“How likely is that she will need such equipment?”
 
“Rather unlikely.”
 
“And this room is just next to the other room. The emergency equipment can be moved to the other room?”
 
“In ten seconds.”
 
I was aghast and I said so, “It must be some obtuse male doctor who has devised this absurd system for women. A childbirth is a natural process, and when a woman is in a most vulnerable situation, you compel her to make a move and bring her into this inhospitable room. I will take that ten-second chance and let my wife have her baby in the birthing room, where I will be present.”
 
It took some negotiation and a sixteen-point check by the doctor to permit my wife to have a normal childbirth in the pleasant birthing room, with dimmed lights and soft music that she cared for, and a photo or two she wanted next to her bed. I must add that, when the doctor finally came to deliver the baby, he again suggested that she be moved into the operations room. I held my ground and said that, unless he had just seen some condition in the patient that needed to reverse the earlier decision, she should stay in the birthing room.

She stayed and had her baby in the birthing room. No move, no hassle, a smooth childbirth.
​
It was a beautiful healthy girl. We were ecstatic.
 
Our best hospitals and nursing homes are steadily becoming more and more like the most hard-nosed factories, where the human element is lost, patients’ ease and comfort are overlooked and the only thing that matters is the convenience of the institution – of the doctors, nurses and administrative staff.
 
Of course, work has to be done efficiently, but when the quest for competence overlooks the patient’s human priorities, the whole profession appears in an adverse light. I was a patient recently in more than one reputed hospital and saw several good doctors, and yet came away often with a rather negative impression. I come from a family of doctors and I consider the experience sad.
 
I am sure there were decent people in the French aristocracy before their throats were split by the guillotine during the French Revolution. There too must have been good people in the Russian landed aristocracy before the Bolsheviks gunned them down. Yet the systems of which they were a part was cruel, exploitative and evil. Good people, alas, are often entangled in and become an integral part of a bad system – and they don’t even notice how bad it really is.

A true-blue eccentric is a joy for ever. I had a friend who kept a python as a pet and fed it live mice for lunch and dinner. Another two who had a thing for birds: one whistled to them, the other – believe it or not -- spoke to them. I even had a girl friend who believed in devils. I dared not contradict her lest she should consider me one.

​Now the world has an authentic eccentric to watch. The Conservative leader of Britain’s House of Commons, Jacob Rees-Mogg. According to the New York Times, he is very tall and very thin. That should annoy him, for he detests the word ‘very.’ He has a thing for words. He has created a parliamentary record by using the longest word in its history, ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ (it means the act of regarding something worthless). He says European judges make him think of the word. Probably there are quite a few leaders in India and the US who would justify the use of this unwieldy word.
 
He combines his quirkiness with an aristocratic bearing. His father was editor of London Times and his grandmother was an American actress. This does not, however, quite explain his foisting the portentous name on his son of Sixtus Dominic Boniface Christopher Rees-Mogg. His sister has the name Annunziata and, when she ran for public office, refused to shorten it to Nancy Mogg. For his election campaign in a working-class neighborhood, Rees-Mogg went around in a Mercedes Benz and took along his nanny.
 
Rees-Mogg is wealthy, having made his money two decades ago as an investment banker in London and Hong Kong. He is still a partner of Somerset Capital Management with its $9 billion portfolio. He spurns the ideas of climate change and welfare benefits and, as a Catholic, opposes abortion in all circumstances. A Conservative colleague referred to him as an ‘unfailing, unbending, unrelenting reactionary’ and another said she would leave the party if he became a leader, but added Rees-Mogg was ‘incredibly charming.’ Charming or not, his firm Brexit stand has brought him prominence and he is now a key party leader.
 
What made me pay him special attention was that the moment he took office, he sent out a circular forbidding his staff from using certain words. I have to plead mea culpa and admit that when I took charge of a division in a new company, I did a rather similar thing. I was aghast at the ugly, pompous verbiage people wrote in companies, and more so perhaps in public enterprises. It pained me to read such gobbledygook from other companies, but it hurt more to find my own staff adding to such drivel. I wrote a letter to all my division members suggesting that they write simple and polite letters and avoid clichés and hackneyed phrases. Blandly, I told them that there was no such thing as business English, some esoteric thing that working people were entitled or obligated to toss at each other. There was only good English and bad English.
 
Instead of “With reference to your letter dated 17th of July, 2019, we have great pleasure in informing you that we are in complete agreement with your proposal to introduce the new procedure with effect from 15th of August, 2019,” one could write “Please start the new procedure from 15 August.” Clearly, “great” and “complete” are redundancies, “pleasure” is irrelevant, “introduce” is a pomposity and “with effect from” a legalistic bombast. Instead of a eight-word sentence, when one writes a 38-word sentence, it does not help anything, certainly not business. It is just a stumbling block.
 
Why say “It is a matter of deep and abiding concern for our organization” when you really mean “It limits our production” or “It delays our sales drive”? Why say hypocritical things like “We assure you of our continuing and ongoing interest in your current offer” when you don’t intend to buy, instead of an honest and simple, “We can’t buy now, but please tell us of future offers”? If you don’t like something, it is better for both sides to say it clearly but politely. If you have an interest, though you can’t offer business now, it is better to sound like a decent ally than a spurious well-wisher.
 
Rees-Mogg is an eccentric politico par excellence, and he has proscribed words like ‘equal’ and ‘lot.’ But I sympathize with his loathing of abominations like ‘due to’, ‘hopefully’, ‘yourself’, ‘ongoing’, ‘unacceptable’ and ‘pleased to learn.’ These pesky phrases mar most missives in the business world.
 
The patrician politician, alas, does not seem to have kept up with the cyberworld. He prescribes, like old typewriter users, two spaces after each period before a new sentence begins. He doesn’t seem to know that word-processing software is already programmed to allot greater space after a full stop. ​Still, I like a quirky curmudgeon when he appears on our horizon.

After a couple of years, I was back in Washington, this time to work for the World Bank. My home was in the suburb, and I decided to buy a new house downtown to reduce my commute. Buying takes exploring and checking. I rented an apartment meanwhile, a short walk from the office, near the Dupont Circle.
 
I loved the location. It was always buzzing. Lots of people, old and young, men and women. Some worked in the offices nearby, some were there to buy medicines, stationery and clothes, and others were there simply to enjoy the area. There was a great variety of restaurants, Greek, Chinese and American, a bunch of bistros and coffee houses, even a steak house. There was a small store that sold magazines and newspapers from many countries in different languages and a large book store, with a charming café at the back.
 
I had ordered a car, but I did not feel deprived waiting for it to arrive. There was a metro station, good enough to take me to most of the places I cared for, the Library of Congress or the many Smithsonian museums. But most of the time I walked and enjoyed the sights and sounds of a new old city. Washington was fun and walking around seemed the best way to get the most of it.
 
The weekends were the best, for I had few responsibilities. Housekeeping was zero and I rarely cooked as I ate out most of the time. Sunday morning, I woke unexpectedly early, picked up a croissant and magnum-sized coffee at the corner store, picked up the sixty-page New York Times and forty-page Washington Post and walked over to the Dupont Circle.
 
The Circle is a hub of ten streets and at the center is a small park with benches. I loved its smallness. It seemed familiar in less than an hour. Sometimes a small band played there, sometimes a lone guitar player sang out his heart. I loved those little shows too. It seemed they cared for the place and the park. Today there was no performer, not yet. I liked the Sabbath silence.
 
I put down the heavy papers, slowly ate the croissant with relish and took a first sip of the fragrant coffee. I was just considering starting with the papers, when a man came and sat down at the other end of my bench.

​“May I?” he said and cast a glance at my pile of newspapers.
 
I let him have the Washington Post to read and picked up the front section of the New York Times. A bird came and perched itself on another bench and gave out what seemed like the first bar of the shortest song. What better accompaniment could there be for all the news of murderous wars and economic collapse?

r​Then the man next to me lowered the paper and seemed to be taking a measure of me. He was a large white man in his fifties, with a reddish face, indifferently shaved and coiffed, in clothes that had seen better days. I was in mufti, but, in clean and freshly pressed clothes, and must have seemed quite a contrast to him. He took me in, brazenly, head to toe.
 
Then he said, “Look at you! You must have come from another country. Yet you are so clearly well off. You wear good clothes, even good shoes. I can smell your cologne. The American government looks after you and pays you a lot of money, I am sure.
 
“And here I am, sitting on a park bench next to you, in dirty clothes. With little to call my own. Yet I am the native son. I was born here. The government pays me nothing. What a shame.”
 
I was taken aback. Yes, I was probably well off compared to him, but, in his view, all because of some discrimination by the US Government!
 
I pointed to my coffee and said, “I paid the man who made that coffee because he gave me something for my money. Usually people pay for some goods or services they have received. Are you doing something for the government? Then they are likely to pay you for it.”
 
“But I am an American. The government should pay me.”
 
“There are 350 million Americans like you. If they did nothing and wanted the government to pay them, the government would go bankrupt quickly. The government has money only because people who work pay taxes and people who do business pay taxes too.”
 
“But the government pays you money!”
 
“No, I pay them money, out of what I earn. And I earn because I work every day. There are hundreds of people like me, who don’t look like you, but they work hard, earn money and pay the government. They help keep the government running and the country running.”
 
As he talked, there was the clear whiff of alcohol from his mouth.
 
“You think so?” he asked.
 
“I know so. This is an immigrant country. It does not matter how people look. It matters what they do. Whether they work and contribute, or they don’t do a thing. It will be a very foolish country that treats badly the people who give it the most and hold to its heart people who don’t contribute. Don’t you think so?”
 
The man seemed surprised to hear what I had said. He was thinking. I thought that was good.
 
“You can keep the newspaper,” I said quietly, bid him goodbye and left the park for home.

When I bought a house and moved into a community of fifty families in a Washington suburb, the first person I met was Melinda.
 
I was moving in at an early hour of the day, when Melinda appeared on my doorstep to welcome me. She was the president of the home owners’ association and would not fail in her role as a welcoming host. She gave me her card and told me I could call her if I needed any help. She also gave me the particulars of my two nearest neighbors and suggested that I get to know them.

​She was a woman in her early sixties, trim and fit. Even at that early hour, she was perfectly coiffed, every hair in its place. She wore a pearl necklace and a silver bracelet. She was superbly cordial and yet quite firm when she explained that as a householder she expected me to follow the association rules. I got the impression that she would be a good ally, but not a person to trifle with.
 
Three days later, she again called to say that the annual meeting of the association would be the following week, and, as a new resident, it would be advantageous for me to come and meet all my neighbors. Toward the end of the meeting, Melinda, presiding over the proceedings, surprised me by introducing me and then asking me to say a few words about myself. I gave a short, facetious description of my current life and work and people laughed.
 
It must have gone down well, for the very next agenda item was the election of a new member of the association board and, before I could take another breath, my name was proposed and accepted. That is how I got to know Melinda well.
 
In the very first meeting I proposed modestly that it might be a good idea to computerize the association records. Melinda said that it was “the most hare-brained idea” she had heard. She had managed everything well with a typewriter and pen-and-paper, and saw no need for a change. In the next two meetings I suggested a few more things, each time evoking the ‘hair-brained’ appellation.
 
I realized, with clarity and without rancor, that my views were rather different from Melinda’s and the other board members dared not differ from her firm views. I pondered leaving the board, for I could contribute little that would not be discarded forthwith.
 
Then something curious occurred. I met Melinda on a trail one Saturday, while she was walking her dachshund, and I mentioned that I was recovering from the morning’s news that Richard Burton had died. I had loved his love of poetry and his recorded recitals, and owed him my understanding of John Donne. She responded warmly and our discussion stayed into histrionics. She discovered that I loved the theater and had read plays from Euripedes and Sophocles to Richard Albee and Arthur Miller. I found that she had been a Broadway star as a young woman and later an important entertainment manager in the US Army and a key figure in the Washington theater world. She knew most of the principal directors and producers of plays in the country.
 
After that there was no end to our discussions. I would come up to her home after dinner and split a bottle of Chivas Regal for hours while we talked. I would get complimentary box tickets for me and a friend for any local play I wanted to see. After we had talked about drama for hours, I might mention a proposal for the association. She would listen quietly and at the next board meeting suddenly say, “Nandy has come up with the curious idea…” Seldom anybody demurred.
 
Extremely fit and unusually active, Melinda was suddenly stricken with a breathing problem six years later. I took her to the nearest hospital for an examination. The doctor frowned when he saw the test reports and insisted that she be admitted immediately. Melinda was equally insistent that she was fine and would come back. I persuaded her to get admitted and promised to get her files, clothes and jewelry from home. I did, but she was too ill by then to use any of them.
 
Without her hair styled and the pearl necklace in place, she refused to meet any visitors. But she would see me every day. That is the first time I unearthed her real name; Melinda apparently was just a stage name. I also found she was fifteen years older than she looked. She was in agony and it was painful for me to see her daily decline. It was a relief when Melinda gave up her struggle and breathed her last. To the end, we talked about plays and the extraordinary things they had meant in our lives.
 
Her many admirers organized a memorial meeting. It was, as Melinda wanted, more a celebration: a star sang songs from Melinda’s favorite musicals accompanied by a famous pianist. I was asked to speak and there was room-wide uproarious laughter when I quoted Melinda’s oft-repeated phrase, “the most hare-brained idea.” Clearly a large majority of them had had to hear at some point that phrase from our common feisty friend.

A bright yellow cap suddenly blew by in the air and I instinctively put out a hand to catch it. It twirled around my index finger in the strong breeze, before I firmly grasped it and brought it in.
 
“Thank you so much,” said a grateful young woman, who had given up on her cap, until a complete stranger, me, retrieved it from the gust of wind.
 
The phenomenon of a wayward cap is perfectly intelligible when you realize it occurred on the sunny, windy top deck of a large sea liner. I am in a ship, a massive ship with twenty decks, holding nine thousand people. It is virtually a city on the water.

​I am more used to a plane than a ship, especially a ship dedicated to entertainment. I have scant use for the huge casino or the ostensibly bargain sale of jewelry and clothes. Not being James Bond, I don’t want to make – more likely, lose – a pile of money, nor being one of his many paramours, I don’t have a lust for gems or garbs. There are a bunch of shows, some musical and some athletic, and I attend a few as my mood dictates. I rather like the abundance of bistros and restaurants sprinkled at different levels, where I can eat or drink any time I want, just as I do at home. Not yoked to office hours any longer, I consume the way a free man should: when I feel the need to do so.
 
I used to know a ship’s captain who joked, “A cruise is a cross I bear when I have to.” His point was that all kinds of people save up money for a cruise and enter on it with extravagant expectations; as a captain, he had to struggle to meet their unrealistic dreams and flimsy complaints. He cited an elderly teacher with false teeth who grumbled about overdone steak to a lusty youngster who entertained too many beaus at a time, who in turn started a noisy fight. Remembering him I am grateful enough for a beautiful, quiet room with peaceable neighbors.
 
When I wake up, I pull the curtains and see the reassuring sight of the blue Caribbean Sea, glistening in the morning light. I open the glass door and step on to a small terrace, where they have thoughtfully placed a table and two chairs. It is a great place to sit and write. Or just to dream and dawdle, and watch the modest waves created by the boat I am riding. Amazingly, the behemoth creates very little noise – I haven’t even heard a roar or a whistle that I associate with steamers – and I hear only a mild hum. The water is a beautiful cobalt blue, with a white foam and occasionally some yellow algae.
 
There is a great variety of entertainment shows, but for the vast majority of people the greatest entertainment seems to be the plentiful free food. Young and old, I found everybody eating all the time, exactly the opposite of what doctors would recommend for a visibly obesity-tilted crowd. The open decks were crowded with distinctly underdressed men and women, the latter clearly in bigger numbers, soaking in the immoderate sun, again in utter defiance of doctors recommend. I have no such love of the midday sun and feel content to get some exposure only when I walk at home in the morning and at dusk.
 
If not the food or the sun, or even the plebeian entertainment, what then did help me pass the time? I only have to pose that question to feel embarrassed by it. Why should I need, like a child, to be fed entertainment by the spoonful? A child, in fact, if left by herself, finds a thousand ways to amuse herself. An adult, with a modicum of education and experience, has an enormous fund of resources to find diversion. The whole world around him is waiting to flood him with engrossing material. Some pre-packaged entertainment material, like a film or a play, may be wonderfully engaging, but it is pathetic being who must be constantly supplied by such material to be amused or feel engaged with the universe.
 
Severed from my familiar world of friends, neighbors, acquaintances and even my home or familiar surroundings, I seem to have developed a closer relationship with my very temporary cabin in the ship. Because of my nomadic life, I have stayed in hundreds of hotels, but never have I struck such a close rapport with my tiny desk, my minuscule shower or my pint-sized terrace. I lie on a deck chair and watch the wide blue sky and rediscover the reconfiguring clouds that I don’t remember having noticed since I was in school. Given a few more days, I might find mysteries in the carpet on my floor that nobody has noticed. There is something to be said for presence of leisure and the total absence of distractions like a phone and an internet.
 
At the end of a week, an unbelievably uneventful serene seven-day stretch, I am walking down the gang plank and emerging from the large ship, when I notice again the bright yellow cap and underneath a bright, wide smile. She recognizes me. What better reward than that silent recognition of my brief legerdemain!

You can’t love Venice without loving its canals and bridges; you can’t love Italy without loving gelato and Sophia Loren; you can’t love Europe without loving its small bistros and narrow streets. And you can’t love Kolkata without loving its second-hand booksellers on College Street.
 
I was an impecunious student living at the busy, bustling, blaring corner of College Street and Harrison Road. We lived on the third floor, but even there we often shut the large French windows to mute the din. The trams created a metallic racket, the honking of the buses and the hollering of their conductors rose to the heavens, and there was the steady hum of vendors and traders offering their wares.
 
Young, heedless, I became inured to this unwelcome orchestra in three weeks. I slept well, punctuated only by erotic dreams. I was excited instead by the vibrancy of the place. In two opposite corners stood two fragrant restaurants, one famous for its confectionery and the other for its mutton delicacies. Next to one was a shop whose windows displayed the most spectacular saris, of colorful silk and exquisitely designed cotton. Ample middle-aged women came to shop, but occasionally they were accompanied by a slender young beauty that left me enthralled. Set back from the corner was a large, messy market that repelled me, but next to that was a dream house, a movie theater. On its upper-floor deck were huge cutouts of beautiful stars, facing the window of my room, and a well-endowed Madhubala was enough to populate my erogenous dreams for a month.
 
But the most exciting thing in that buoyant, boisterous corner was the long series of second-hand books for sale. There were seven to nine vendors who ran well-stocked consignment stores, selling all manner of books. One or two specialized in science tomes or college texts, but most sold all manner of books, ranging from literature to how-to books to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Some were soiled or had a missing cover, but many were in great shape and could be had for virtually a song. If you bought more than one volume, the shopkeeper would readily offer a discount. When clients were few, they even allowed you indulgently to stand and read a passage or two.
 
The display was modest but ingenious. None of the vendors had a bookshop or a stall worth talking about. They displayed their books on small planks hung from the railings that bordered the campus of a college, just outside of which they plied their trade. What could not be displayed they kept in cheap metal boxes on the ground. It was astonishing how well they remembered the titles and authors of the books they displayed or kept in storage. All you had to do was say half of an author’s name or a fraction of a title, and the vendors would produce the book in an instant. Their metal boxes also contained a plastic cover. That was their tenuous protection from a sudden downpour that could destroy their painstakingly collected books and decimate their inventory. 

​Rain, in fact, was what caused my first acquaintance with Bidhu Babu. He was a sixtyish man, with thinning white hair and old-fashioned metal glasses. I lived next door and passed the booksellers morning and evening. I could not help but notice his august bearing and quiet way of talking with customers. Returning home one afternoon, I was suddenly caught in a heavy downpour and started sprinting for the front door. Passing Bidhu Babu, I found him fully drenched, still trying to put the last book in a box.
 
I stopped and said, “That’s my home. Let me take that box. You collect the other books and follow me before all those get soaked.” When we got indoors, I saw him shivering and went to get a towel.
 
I hadn’t done much, but Bidhu Babu seemed touched. He told me his name and added that he had seen me often looking at old books on the street. I explained that I was a student and I liked reading literature, but I had very little money to buy new books.
 
Bidhu Babu had worked in a small printing shop, but when business shrunk he was let go. Since he was a widower and his son lived and worked in Pune, he decided he would start a business that required little or no capital. I liked both his enterprise and his personality. I felt we had connected at some level.
 
From then on, whatever money I had from my parents or earned by tutoring students, I used to buy novels from Bidhu Babu. He found the latest authors for me and gave me attractive prices, and I tried to reciprocate by bringing my friends as new clients.
 
Four years later, when I was leaving for the university, Bidhu Babu said he was leaving his business, for his son had invited him to live with him in Pune.
 
“I am not as young and strong as I was. Still, I am considering whether I should again start a book selling shop in Pune. My son says he can rent a stall near his home.”
 
He looked happy, and I felt happy for him. But I was losing the best book seller in town. And a friend.

It is a picture of a little girl. It is a black-and-white photo of a girl striking a dance pose.
 
She is a girl of about nine. She has luxuriant hair, cut to shorter than shoulder length. She wears a lovely long dress with an attractive floral print. She in fact looks pretty, almost festive. But she wears a decidedly melancholy look. It is a picture I can’t get out of my mind. Why does a little girl look so sad?

​I asked the person who showed me the photo. Yes, she was nine when the picture was taken. She had just taken part in a dance drama in her school, where she played the role of a street vendor who carried her ware in a basket on her head. She received applause from the audience and that pleased her.
 
But, when the play ended and her mother came to collect her, she was accompanied by the man she had seen many times with her mother before. He always came when her father was not there. He was an engineer and he brought gifts for her mother. She knew he was the cause of innumerable fights between her parents. She also knew that her mother was greatly enamored of him and had no intention of abandoning him. She did not dislike him, but she knew well her parents’ relationship would remain highly toxic as long the man would be on the scene.
 
The man said to her, “You did a good job in that play. Let me take a photo.”
 
Her mother made a sign of approval and the man directed her to pose like a vendor and pretend she had a basket on her head. She did not want to do it. She did not want to please the man. But she knew her mother would be annoyed if she did not comply. She complied. The photo was the result. She posed but she wasn’t happy.
 
“That is clear from the photo,” I said. What happened to the man, I wanted to know.
 
“He had advanced colon cancer,” she replied, “my mother visited him every day. She told me she prayed morning and evening for his recovery. The prayer wasn’t answered. He died very young, in his early forties.”
 
“And your mother?”
 
“She didn’t last long either. She had an unusual heart condition. She passed away five years later.”
 
She paused and added, “My parents never reconciled. They lived under the same roof, but they barely talked. The air in my home was fraught with hostility. Sometimes I felt I couldn’t breathe. The last few days of her life, mother didn’t even want to see father. I sat alone next to her bed and gave her the medicines.”
 
She resumed, “Father loved me. But what had happened, not just a day or two but for years, had poisoned our family life. Father was not at home very much. He seemed to avoid our home.
 
“When I married and moved out, he lived alone in the large house. Like a ghost, encircled by the rank residue of bitter memories. I found it difficult to connect with him. Slowly but surely, I gave up the effort. He stopped existing in my life long before he met his end in a lonely hospital room.
 
“I truly missed him. I missed his attachment to me, his deep affection. I missed even more the far closer connection I had with my mother, who was my friend, almost my model. But she was also the person who had betrayed me. She was too intent on seeking her own satisfaction, no matter what the consequence was for her family or her child. She wanted her affair and whatever it meant for her unfulfilled life. I loved her and yet I could not but hate her too.”
 
I looked at the photograph in my hand and I looked at her. Something of the melancholy showed on her face when she went quiet, absorbed in her thoughts.
 
We are constantly told that our destiny is in our hands, we can make of our lives whatever we want. What does a little girl do when she is trapped in a toxic family, where she needs love and certainty and contends with tension and hostility? How does she cope with two caring parents who are caught up in an unending spiral mutual neglect and suspicion? With her scant resources, she must struggle painfully just to survive. to hope one day to breathe the air of trust and confidence that should be every child’s right.
 
I hold now in my hand a faded copy of the photo of a little girl in a dance pose, with a festive dress and melancholy face, and a sketchy notion of what transpired in her later life, and say a silent prayer that my two little girls – and their little girls and all little girls – have a brighter look on their face and go forward in life with a little more of joy and assurance.