My father had a lot of friends and he put a lot of stock in what his friends said. One of his friends was the principal of a school. It was no surprise that, one night, over dinner dad divulged that he was considering moving me to his friend’s school. He thought I would have better education there.
 
It wasn’t any better, unless a bigger building and a more pretentious name could be assumed to portend better learning. Our texts were the same dull books, our teachers were the same unimaginative task masters, and our hours comprised the same boring rote learning. In literature, I refused to write the silly formal essays others wrote and got reprimanded for submitting New Yorker-like tongue-in-cheek compositions that raised the tutor’s eyebrows sky-high. Of Pythagoras’s theorem, I found somewhere an alternative proof that I considered more elegant and drove my teacher up the wall for using it instead of the standard proof he had taught in the class. The first lesson was to conform; the last lesson was the same. Anything faintly original and slightly different invited derision and penalties.
 
My guerilla tactic was to take an inconspicuous rear seat – but not the last bench, for that would invite branding as a backbencher – and amuse myself in other ways. The central one was to bring an interesting book and focus on finishing it, looking up occasionally at the teacher or blackboard. The other was, especially when the teacher set a task to be completed in the class, to draw sketches of other students, the teachers or whatever I could see through the windows. Of the last, the most intriguing was the plump girl who brushed her long hair, standing at the window of a neighboring house. Often a portrait was accompanied by a satirical limerick, usually focused on what I considered the person’s most annoying feature or execrable habit.

It was the latter that proved my undoing. Walrus, a teacher who had earned the title because of his luxuriant moustache, set us the task, in his composition class, of writing an essay on My Most Memorable Experience. I was certain the others would write pieces on terminally dull themes like ‘The time I scored the winning goal’ or ‘The year I got the medal for geography.’ I considered titles like ‘The year I got caned for asking a witty question’ or ‘The time I scored with a plump girl,’ but settled for the modest story of my blowing off a batsman’s glasses in a cricket match with a wayward googly.

I should explain that students were expected to carry as many exercise books as the subjects taught, with classwork in the appropriate notebook. I carried so many story books in my bag that I had space for just one exercise book, in which I recorded all classwork. When at the end of the class Walrus collected all the exercise books, so that he could grade them at leisure, he took away my only exercise book. The greater disaster was that the exercise book contained my entire series of sketches of the teachers, including Walrus, along with waggish limericks on each. I had nightmares of being summoned to the principal’s office and then asked to go home with my shamed parents, irrevocably expelled.
 
The next day, as Walrus walked into the class with a quizzical look on his face, I anticipated disaster. When Walrus somberly declared that he had made a strange discovery from the exercise books he had collected, I waited for lightning to strike.
 
Walrus took the pile of exercise books from his bag and placed them on his desk. Without a word, he took the exercise book from the top, adjusted his glasses and started reading. It was the story of a cricket match, unquestionably my essay. He read several paragraphs, then stopped and said, “I will not read all of it for a reason. The essay is not exactly what I expected to see, but it is a good essay, a very amusing one. I am impressed that someone in my class can write something as comical as this.”
 
It was not exactly what I expected to hear.
 
He added, “I will not read the whole essay, because I have something more interesting to read. I find in this exercise book a long series of sketches, each accompanied by a short poem. I could read them all to you, but I will selectively read the ones that are most likely to be of interest to you.”
 
He started reading the limericks on the teachers, and after each reading held up the exercise book to show the sketch. He began with the principal and went through all our teachers. Finally, as my anticipation grew, he came to the verse about him, read it and demonstrated the sketch and said, “I did not realize that my facial hair was the most noticeable feature about me! Well, now I know.”
 
The bell rang. The class was over.
 
Before leaving, Walrus said, “I believe creativity deserves some recognition. I have recommended to the principal that the author of the essay and poems should be the next editor of our school magazine.”
 
When the magazine came out six months later, I saw my writing in print for the first time in my life.

Years ago I had a friend in school who could write with both hands. It amazed me, for I could write with only one. It amazed me, too, to find that there were creatures, like alligators, that lived comfortably both on land and in water. It took me a little more time to notice that people do two or more things, perhaps not simultaneously but sequentially, quite competently. The same person can cook well and play excellent bridge or be a high jump champion and play piano like a pro. But, is there a link? How does one transition, and how easily and enjoyably, from one activity to another?
 
I have an interest in languages and learned a number of them. I have tried my hand at writing in three of them and translated from another three. Bengali, my mother tongue, and English, my acquired love, are the two closest to my heart. I continue to write professionally in both of them, and that led to a strange discovery.
 
To meet a deadline or in anticipation of one, I sometimes write two or three columns for a publication. After writing three columns in succession for an English publication, when I turn to write an article in Bengali I feel a strong resistance within me. In fact, it appears to be an unpleasantly difficult chore. I have to remind myself that it is my first language and I have written a book in it before I can persuade myself to sit down and write a piece in Bengali. The reverse is also true. If I write a bunch of articles successively in Bengali, it seems an onerous, uncomfortable enterprise to write anything in English. Again, as I force myself to the task, the discomfort dissolves and my computer keyboard eventually
gets rattling.
 
I was mystified. What lay behind this persistent, powerful resistance?

​That made me ask a more fundamental question. Why do I write in two different languages? What makes me seek out a second language to express myself when I am already doing so in one?
 
The true answer is so clear to me that it amazes me that I had not realized it before. The two languages are two totally different media. I cannot do in the one what I can do in the other. I sense freedom and fluidity when I write something that intrigues me in the language of my choice. Were I to try and write the same thing in another language, I would feel constrained. The two languages seem to offer me two different spheres of operation. I would not dream of trying to do in a second language what I have done in the first.
 
This may seem farfetched, for in the world today things are constantly being presented in different languages. I have no doubt that a computer manual or a tourist guidebook can be prepared competently in two or more languages. A creative product, an essay or a novel, is rather a different thing. You might object that novels and even poems have been translated in many languages. Frankly, I would think of the original and the translation as very different products. A translated story or a poem – I have myself tried both – makes an impact quite different from the original, and it serves well those who cannot read the original. But the emotional charge of the one is a quantum leap from that of the other.
 
What I have realized is that, emotionally and culturally, I enter a wholly different realm when I move from one language to another. I have always hated changing homes, even when I am moving to a far better home. I find it more than uncomfortable; it is nearly traumatic for me. That is precisely the sensation I have when I switch from one language to another. It is distasteful. But once I have gotten into my stride and have written in a language for a while – in the way I have lived in a new home for several months and grown accustomed – I have found my place in a new universe and enjoy my stay in it. But the sensation of transition is discombobulating.
 
Even this characterization is superficial. If my language is a universe that envelopes me, it shapes the way I think and feel and write, it gives me pause to think of the helpless creature I seem to be in the face of the whole complex of my genes, my upbringing, my modeling on my parents, my sibling relations, my community, my city, my country, my school and university and my work in different institutions. If these have all covertly but comprehensively influenced me, what remains of my individuality, my vaunted objectivity or impartiality? Do I know which way I am turning inwardly and why? Am I helplessly, like a whirling weather cock, at the mercy of veiled, vast forces, to which I must bow, without even knowing when and why?
 
It gives me a clue to the vaunted impartiality of critics and scholars, who have to pretend to judge works of art or literature solely on their merit, and not on their appeal to surreptitious elements that lie alive but dormant within them, as much as in me.
 
Writing has sometimes been described as a journey of exploration. It has certainly been for me an adventure of disconcerting discovery.

Legend has it that King Janak of Videhi, better known as the adoptive father of Sita, encountered a young man, so overwhelmed by the opulence of Janak’s palace, that he made bold to ask of the sovereign, “How can you function as a wise king if you are always distracted by the pleasures of wealth and power?”
 
To Janak’s credit, he was intrigued more than irritated by the cheeky question, and responded with a challenge, “If you can make a full round of my palace with a bowl of oil without spilling a drop, I will answer you in detail.” 

​The bowl was full to the brim and the young man had to take exceptional care not to spill the oil. When he completed the round successfully, Janak asked him about design of the palace, its golden dome and frescoed walls, filigreed doors and grand chandeliers, and the multi-hued uniform of its many guards. The man couldn’t answer.
 
“How can I notice any of those things,” he expostulated, “my eyes were glued to the darn bowl lest the oil should spill!”
 
“Yes,” said Janak, “you had a mission to fulfill, and all else fell beyond the margin.”
 
He went on to explain that the mission of being a good king so absorbed his attention that everything else became peripheral.
 
I find the story unforgettable, for, like the youth, I tiptoe cautiously around the palace of my life, wondering what is my mission.
 
Most of us are defined by the work we do. The first thing we want to know about people we meet is what they do. Once we know a person is a lawyer or doctor, we put him or her in a slot that determine the person’s status with us. No matter that a lawyer can be a variety of things, from a criminal litigator to a corporate advisor to a university researcher, good or bad. A doctor can be a veteran emergency physician or a newbie consultant to insurance companies. We simply ascribe a value to the person based on our earlier notion of doctors and lawyers.
 
For years I was a corporate executive. My work changed greatly over the years, especially as I changed departments and locations and took on new projects that interested me. That made not the slightest difference to how people treated me. They just regarded me as an executive stereotype, who wears a suit and tie to his club even in summer, drinks whisky sour in the evening and plays golf. They would have been shocked to learn that I did none of those things, read Hegel and Shakespeare for fun and my abiding interest was relationship pathologies among my colleagues.
 
Later, when I moved to a UN organization, overnight my billing changed to that of international development specialist. I worked on different types of development projects to be sure, but my real interest continued to be relationship issues between expatriate consultants and local specialists – which wasn’t really all that different from what had fascinated me earlier. That did not matter. People branded me as a development guy and that is what determined my branding.
 
Then I joined the diplomatic corps. Once again there were differences and handled problems that looked and sounded very different. But, in its essence, I often found myself mediating relationship issues between the country I represented and the host country – or perhaps some other country or combination of countries. More than others, I found I took a more deliberate and academic approach to what I had to handle – I read more and analyzed documents much more – but my image in most eyes was that of a cocktail guzzling diplomat. Whatever the word, or its associations, meant in the mind of my interlocutors.
 
The strange part was that though I was the same person, often pursuing very similar interests in a slightly different but rather analogous way, my identity was vastly different in the eyes of the people I met and dealt with. This is strange, for a moment’s thought would tell us that each of us is an amalgam of many different identities. I am at any moment, a son, a brother, a husband, a father, a neighbor, a rival in chess or tennis, a cook in the kitchen, a guitar player in a band, a cricketer in a university team and, on a congenial evening, even a bar tender. I do very different things in these diverse roles, I do them with hugely different competence, and I enjoy very different satisfaction in doing them.
 
Like almost anybody else, I live a complex life, playing different roles at different places at different times. When people brand me, by quickly stereotyping me with single word, like executive or diplomat, they don’t really grasp my life, my goals or my values. They just bury it all under the rubric of a notion that totally misrepresents me.
 
What is even more dangerous is that I myself have been sometimes tempted to think of myself simply as an executive or a diplomat and forget what a complex bundle I really am. Those are the times I have tried to think of King Janak and his parable of the oil-filled bowl. And ask myself: What is really my mission?
 
I wish I had a simple answer.

The large crowd, spilling over to the street and blocking the traffic, caught my eye a warm Saturday morning. It mystified me, for I had heard of no planned political rally in the city. Our house faced a movie house and my second-floor room window gave a wide-angle view of its portico and entrance. What could it be? Could the winsome Nimmi, the heroine of the new release, whose giant cutout adorned the theater entrance, be the expected guest at the cinema? Would I be so lucky as to catch a sight of the ample goddess?
 
A school student, bursting with hormones and curiosity, I would not budge from my window. I ate my breakfast, the bowl of ginger granola mother had served, standing impatiently at the window and scanning the street. The crowd had multiplied, the traffic had stalled, and a police posse was trying bravely to keep things in order. People seemed excited, anticipating something special and periodically giving a shout, of annoyance or ebullience I wasn’t sure.
 
Finally, after more than an hour of waiting, there was a deafening roar, as a big black limousine slowly slid through the throng. A door opened, a person emerged, but the six surrounding burly bodyguards let neither me nor the people see the person. A groan of disappointment arose from the crowd. I returned to the last dregs of my granola in despair.
 
Then the remarkable thing happened. Suddenly, miraculously, on the extended upper-floor balcony of the theater appeared a lithe, smiling man, and a giant, spiraling roar of excitement rose from the multitude. It wasn’t really a man, it was Dev Anand, who clearly preceded the 330 million gods of the land. He wore a black shirt, tight black pants, a flamboyant vermilion necktie and an exaggerated pompadour that was his trademark. He also wore five large marigold garlands that must have been foisted on him the moment he entered the theater.

​Dev Anand edged closer to the front end of the balcony where his assembled admirers could see him better. He acknowledged the ceaseless successive waves of noisy adulation, not with the customary folded hands, nor with the prosaic uplifted arms, but with a strange mock-military style of sloppy salute. Once, twice, thrice – and each time a vociferous howl signaled the crowd’s grateful acknowledgement.
 
Then His Stardom played his master stroke. He took the first garland from his neck, bent low and threw it with great force to a section of the crowd. The crowd went wild. People ran, pushed, clawed, fought, grabbed, for a fraction of the garland – or even of a marigold. Before the scuffle was over, Dev Anand took the second garland, bent low again and tossed it in another section of the crowd. Once again, a ferocious pursuit, followed by a furious melee, as people jostled and struggled to secure the minutest part of the star’s cast-off gift.
 
The same scenario played out three more times as the star carefully and energetically, as if he was playing a board game, neatly lobbed a garland in a new direction and provoked a mad frenzy for a fragment of a torn and worthless garland. You saw a thousand hands stretch to touch a particle of a marigold that might have touched the holy corpus of the celluloid deity. Each time after the showy exercise Dev Anand stood erect again, watched the frantic race for a tossed garland and switched on a flashy smile. He seemed satisfied, like a master choreographer, that he had created precisely the denouement he had intended.
 
I was young and naïve, but by the fifth encore of the performance I had begun to feel a creepy sensation. There was something disturbing, in fact revolting, in the calculated game of using people’s adulation to tempt them into a humiliating scramble for a trifle. We all admire some people, somebody beautiful or successful or famous, but to race like hounds for a useless memento seemed demeaning for human beings.
 
Years later, I did some stints for the movie industry and got to mingle with some beautiful people both in the east and the west. I would talk to a few famous stars, be taken aback by their unalloyed confidence that they were the Chosen People who fully merited their place in the sun. They seemed to take for granted the affection and admiration that came their way. They appeared oblivious both that such exaltation was invariably fleeting and the people who offered it were also human, just like them. 

I hate snakes. I have hated them as long as I can remember.
 
My earliest recollection is of a snake I saw in Bihar where I lived briefly. It had rained and the football field was muddy. That didn’t stop me or my friends. We played lustily for hours on a warm afternoon and then sat down near a tree to chat.
 
Just then somebody shouted, “Look!” I saw a midsize yellow-green snake sliding forward in the grass. Its slithering movement gave me the creeps and I realized I would never be comfortable in its proximity. It disappeared in minutes, but I didn’t want to be there any longer and left quickly.
 
My aunt was very keen on plants and animals and she would take my brother and me to the zoo. I loved those visits and absorbed avidly all she had to say about whatever we saw. There was a separate enclosure for snakes of all kinds, large and small. I went along the first time, but after that nothing would persuade me to approach the area. My aunt saw my aversion and let me sit and wait on a bench while she went with my brother to see the snakes.
 
The aversion remained. I was even uncomfortable looking at photographs of snakes. My wife, Jane, loved the National Geographic magazine and subscribed to it. I loved its coverage of different countries and cultures and its extraordinary photographs of unknown regions. One month it had a special section on snakes and its cover had the vivid photograph of a giant python. I saw Jane reading it with great interest, but I couldn’t bear to look at the python’s coils every time I passed the living room center table.
 
Fortunately for me my daughter’s piano teacher, while waiting for my recalcitrant daughter to turn up, I hate snakes. I have hated them as long as I can remember.
 
My earliest recollection is of a snake I saw in Bihar where I lived briefly. It had rained and the football field was muddy. That didn’t stop me or my friends. We played lustily for hours on a warm afternoon and then sat down near a tree to chat.
 
Just then somebody shouted, “Look!” I saw a midsize yellow-green snake sliding forward in the grass. Its slithering movement gave me the creeps and I realized I would never be comfortable in its proximity. It disappeared in minutes, but I didn’t want to be there any longer and left quickly.
 
My aunt was very keen on plants and animals and she would take my brother and me to the zoo. I loved those visits and absorbed avidly all she had to say about whatever we saw. There was a separate enclosure for snakes of all kinds, large and small. I went along the first time, but after that nothing would persuade me to approach the area. My aunt saw my aversion and let me sit and wait on a bench while she went with my brother to see the snakes.
 
The aversion remained. I was even uncomfortable looking at photographs of snakes. My wife, Jane, loved the National Geographic magazine and subscribed to it. I loved its coverage of different countries and cultures and its extraordinary photographs of unknown regions. One month it had a special section on snakes and its cover had the vivid photograph of a giant python. I saw Jane reading it with great interest, but I couldn’t bear to look at the python’s coils every time I passed the living room center table.
 
Fortunately for me my daughter’s piano teacher, while waiting for my recalcitrant daughter to turn up, evinced some interest in the magazine and turned its pages. When she finished her lesson, I gave her the magazine, saying, “You looked very interested in the magazine. Please take it and read it at your leisure.” I even gave her a box of chocolates as a reward for relieving me of the python’s sight.
 
When Jane returned from her office, she noticed the missing magazine and wondered where it had gone. I embroidered the truth a little and said that our daughter’s piano teacher was so fascinated by the issue that I had felt compelled to offer her the issue.
 
Years have passed since then, but my aversion for snakes does not appear to have abated. I know a little more about them, and their legitimate place in the environment and realize that only a few of them are poisonous and dangerous. No matter. The very sight of them makes me uncomfortable and I certainly don’t want to touch a magazine that features a gorgeous snake, large or small.
 
That is why I can’t understand what happened in a Washington public park a few years ago.

​We lived then in Egypt and had come down to the US for a brief vacation. A friend invited us for a picnic in a local park and we were enjoying a pleasant spring morning, talking and snacking, when something unusual happened. Suddenly all the eyes in the park seemed glued toward its entrance.
 
I saw the reason when I turned and looked. A young man in his thirty’s was entering the park with a large snake wound around his waist and its head held lovingly in his hand. It was quite a sight.
 
He came close to us, unwound his pet and gently placed it on the grass in a spot where it could enjoy the sun. All the children went running to take a close look at the snake that lay on the grass and moved only slightly, clearly enjoying its sunny repose. My daughter, Lina, was mesmerized and went closer and closer to the snake to see it better.
 
Meanwhile, its owner was explaining to his avid young listeners what his remarkable pet does at home (crawls and sleeps), what it eats (live rodents) and where he got it (Philippines, in the Mindanao region). The young man said it was a wonderful pet and very friendly. To prove the point, he let the children first touch and then lift and hold the snake. It was a huge snake and four children were needed to hold it well. To my great chagrin, Lina was the first to volunteer.
 
Lina was happy and proud to hold the front section of the snake. She kept caressing it. Then she said to me, “Daddy, it is beautiful. Why don’t you also hold it with me?” Then it happened.
 
Disinclined to disappoint my six-year-old, I held the snake in my hands. I looked at the design on its body and, believe it or not, I realized that it was beautiful. The snake seemed, for some incredible moments, a wonderful pet indeed, friendly and entirely worthy of caresses. Through all my aversion those moments endure as a vivid, vibrant mystery.

Narayan Gupta had taken a small workshop his father had started late in his life and turned it into a successful engineering company by forty years of unremitting work. He handed over the reins to his son, who had graduated from a reputed technology institute and interned under his dad’s watchful eye for fifteen years. The idea was that Udayan now knew how to run the company the way his father wanted it run and could always take his advice in case of a problem. After all, his father still served on the company board and lived in the same elite edifice, though in a different apartment.
 
It did not work out that way. Not once did Udayan seek his father’s advice on any problem. Nor did he consult his father on any key issue. His father’s role as a board member became insignificant, for Udayan soon ejected the old-timers and packed the board with his handpicked people. Udayan had always been attentive to his parents and close to his mother, Mandira. He visited them regularly, asked them about health issues and brought them gifts. But the visits started getting intermittent when he sensed a frostiness in his father and their duration became shorter.
 
I had known the family for a long time, for my mother had been in college with Mandira and I met Narayan in a management association. They knew Udayan had been briefly my student in Manila and they felt comfortable talking about him.

​“Udayan,” Narayan said over tea, “is a kind of a schizoid personality. He is very polite and deferential in person. Not just with me and his mother. I have noticed how courteous he is with you and his other professors. But he has run roughshod over my colleagues and friends who served on the company board. He has found a way to get rid of them, one by one. My deputy, Arvind, who should have been invaluable to him, he chose to retire early.
 
“In fact, Udayan has rebuffed any attempt to broach a discussion about the company for which I practically gave my life. I don’t know what kind of hubris it is. Why does he resist me, his own father, who only wishes his success?”
 
Udayan was not just polite but extremely gracious when I mentioned that I had met his father and found him rather unhappy.
 
“Father accomplished a lot with the little that he got from grandfather. I admire that. But he does not seem to realize that things have changed. Nor did his friends on the board. We needed a new direction, a new kind of leadership. I had to change the board. We are doing better, though we are not out of the woods.
 
“I can’t talk with father because he won’t help me to weigh options. He wants to make recommendations, and then he gets hurt if I can’t use or accept them. I don’t need that kind of backseat driving.”
 
I was sad to hear the two sides and was impressed when Mandira spoke in her husband’s absence.
 
“They both want to break the ice,” she said, “but they don’t know how. Every time they talk about the company, they get impatient or unhappy. Yet that is what they really want to talk about but can’t. Udayan naturally wants to avoid unpleasantness, and resists going in that direction.”
 
I agreed with her that they are likely to disagree, and even become disagreeable, if they talk about the company.
 
“But that is what they would really like to talk about,” she said.
 
“Right, but they are not ready for it.”
 
“What then is the solution?”
 
“The solution, if they are prepared to consider it, is to start by talking about a different thing: how they are going to talk about the company. They must both realize that, even with the best of intentions, they have reached a road-block. So, they need to talk about the road-block. Udayan can say: What kind of discussion will be helpful for him and what kind will not be. Narayan can say: I will not recommend actions, I will only suggest some perspectives and say why those may be useful to consider. They can agree at the start on a specific slice of time, say a half-hour, and see how it goes.”
 
Mandira thought about my idea and said, “Perhaps that could be a beginning. Perhaps I could mediate it.”
 
I was amazed, weeks later, when Udayan talked about his father with heart-warming candor, “It has taken me time to realize that my father can be many things at the same time. He can be tough and warm, stubborn and flexible, adversarial and loving. We couldn’t talk about the company without friction. Now, somehow, we have learned to discuss quietly. I think he understands the new problems I have. I also think he has some insights I can use. I was wrong to imagine he was a spent force.”
 
I was happy to hear him say so. I had to restrain myself, however, from telling him that nobody, absolutely no human being, is ever really a spent force.

On my left is a young mother, desperately trying to calm her three little children, one of whom is wailing. The child has doubtless sensed that something is amiss and people around her, including her mother, are upset about something. On my right is an elderly man, elegantly dressed in a seersucker suit even on this humid summer day, impatiently tossing the magazine he has finished reading and restlessly looking left and right, as if he expects something to turn up and change a disagreeable situation.
 
I am in an airport. Washington’s Dulles International Airport, which has been, for many years, the springboard for my many voyages. Especially to Asia, Europe, Middle East and Central and South America. Today it is different.
 
I have come to the airport to make a short, quick trip to Charleston, South Carolina, to see my daughter. I have checked-in my suitcase, cleared the security gauntlet and sat near a boarding gate ready to emplane. That is where the process has stopped. No boarding, no news.

​What gives? Turns out that, though the flight is ostensibly with a major US airline, it is really run by a subsidiary, whose operating system has unexpectedly collapsed. None of their flights can take off. They don’t even know how long it might take to get their system going. They just apologize and ask their passengers to wait.
 
Hundreds of passengers sit fuming, furiously counting the hours. I am slightly better off. I have a mobile phone, fully charged. I talk to an assortment of friends, with whom I seldom have the time for a leisurely chat. I write to another set of friends, at uncharacteristic length, whose letters usually evoke brief responses.
 
As the wait lengthens, I open my case and bring out my trusted laptop. This is my ultimate weapon. I can check the latest news. I can play electronic games. I can read incoming mail and respond at length. Above all, I can write. That is the never-failing balm for all painful situations, the ultimate answer to all my predicaments.
 
Since I grew up in India and Ramayana was an ever-read, ever-quoted text, I see myself in Trishanku’s Heaven. Trishanku was a king and had done well as a king. When he retired, he had the curious, preternaturally ambitious idea of entering heaven in his earthly body. In the other ancient text of India, Mahabharata, Yudhishthira, wanted to enter heaven with his dog, but that was less a case of ambition than of loyalty. Trishanku cultivated a great sage, Valmiki, who promised to help him. With Valmiki’s celestial heft, Trishanku started rising toward heaven. But another powerful sage, Viswamitra, thought it was a singularly inapt idea and blocked Trishanku’s elevation into heaven. Now it was a clash of wills of two titans. None would yield. Eventually the two came to an agreement. Viswamitra won his point that Trishanku would not enter the celestial heaven with an earthly body. Valmiki kept his promise to Trishanku and assured him a place in heaven, an intermediate, indeterminate heaven.
 
I am in that intermediate, indeterminate sphere. I am not at home; I have locked the doors and left the place definitively. Nor am I in my intended destination, my daughter’s home in Charleston. Thanks to a series of problems, the airlines can’t seem to get their flight going. It keeps muttering public apologies and saying it will tell us the departure time the moment they have solved their problems. I am in a zone of total uncertainty.
 
It makes me think. We are so accustomed to a binary world, where we finish one activity and start another one. Or, at best, do two things, but then we are doing one part of an activity before we turn to a part of the other activity. We are used to a clear beginning and a clear end, even if it is in parts.
 
It is profoundly confusing when we don’t know when something is finished, or even beginning. Or something that was supposed to end – and something else to begin – does not end and continues indefinitely. This is not supposed to happen in our clearly defined world. How can something be so obstreperous as to continue beyond the end-mark we have assigned to it. It seems to create a profoundly disturbing sense of chaos and disunity in our existence. We find it annoying, even very upsetting, when things look uncertain, as if the universe has spun out of control and untoward consequences are expected to follow. Not just the world, but own life seems to have lost its bearing.
 
After the first two hours, maybe three, I encounter a change in me. Does it really matter if this uncertainty continues? Does it make a major difference to my life and to life in general? I find myself thinking differently, less of myself than of the world around me, including the young mother and the older gentleman.
 
Nine hours later, when the airlines announces that the plane has been grounded and the flight cancelled, I feel a little tired but not particularly disturbed. Maybe I will take another flight another day to visit my daughter.