I had just spent three pleasant days with an old friend, Dietrich, in his second-floor apartment in Chicago. We visited museums, splurged in restaurants, explored the streets and talked endlessly. Since he had to catch a flight very early the following day, Saturday, he suggested that I sleep longer, have a decent brunch somewhere and catch an evening shuttle back to Washington.
 
Saturday afternoon I dressed and packed, deciding to leave early for the airport. Suddenly there was a call from a cousin, whom I had met a day earlier, saying he had to come to the hospital after a car accident. I rushed out, took a taxi and went to see him. Fortunately, the doctor said he would be fine in a day or two. I returned to my friend’s apartment to pick up my suitcase and leave for the airport.

​No suitcase. I realized with a shock as I searched the apartment. I had left in such a rush that I could not recollect precisely what I had done with the suitcase. I hadn’t left it in the apartment surely; it would have been there otherwise, for I had the only key besides Dietrich. I must have rolled it out of the apartment into the foyer and absentmindedly left it unattended before rushing out to the hospital.
 
In that case, I reasoned, it must be with the building’s caretaker, who spotted an unattended suitcase and took charge of it. Or a resident reported the item to him and the caretaker gathered it. I felt sure that, in either case, it would be safely in storage, for it was a well-guarded apartment building. Then came the shattering discovery that it wasn’t in storage either. The caretaker searched high and low with me. No suitcase. I had to leave for the airport without the suitcase.
 
It was a disaster. The clothes I lost and the gifts I had bought for friends was a financial loss, no more. But the loss of a large number of documents and work papers was a major concern. It was professionally awkward and embarrassing. It took me more than two months and enormous expense to retrieve store cards, change credit cards, get a new passport, get an extra pair of glasses and sunglasses, order new suits and shirts, pajamas and shoes.
 
Ten weeks later I again had some work in Chicago and Dietrich invited me for a drink. He listened quietly when I told him of my misadventure and the mystery of the missing suitcase.
 
Pensively, he commented, “Since you are sure you didn’t take the suitcase with you to the hospital – why would you! – and it wasn’t in the apartment, it must have been left in the foyer. Yet the caretaker did not find it. An outsider cannot get in and certainly cannot leave with a large suitcase.”
 
He pondered with furrowed brows, “Where could the suitcase be, I wonder.”
 
I was about to say that it was a closed chapter when Dietrich stood up and beckoned me to follow. He walked out of the apartment into the foyer and looked at the entrance of the three other apartments on the floor. He thought for a few seconds, chose the nearest apartment and rang the bell.
 
A young woman opened the door ajar.
 
“Karen, this is my friend who stayed with me three months ago. He lost a suitcase on this floor, a black Samsonite. Any chance you could have seen it.”
 
Karen opened the door a little more to let us enter and then pointed to a corner, “This thing was blocking my way to the elevator. I pushed it there.”
 
It was my suitcase.
 
Dietrich’s jaws tightened, “It never occurred to you to report it to the caretaker? Not in three months! Do you realize the misery and loss you caused, quite unnecessarily, for my friend?”
 
We left brusquely as Karen kept muttering apologies.
 
I flew back home with the suitcase the next day. Three days later a note arrived by mail from Karen.
 
“I got your address from Dietrich. I am sorry for what I did. I know regrets are no use. Please try to forgive me. It may help you to do so if you know that a man I expected to marry for seven years told me that very morning that he was leaving me for another woman. I was not myself.”
 
I was not Sherlock Holmes but I could have said “Elementary” to Dr. Watson. The curious case of the missing suitcase was finally solved.

In Woody Allen’s lesser-known film, September, Stephanie consoles Lane, who has just lost her lover to another woman, “Soon you will leave here, start over again in New York. There will be a million things to keep you busy. It’s going to be okay.”
 
Is this true? Can we plug a hole in our heart with work, new duties, adjusting to a new place and probably a new job, gaining new colleagues and new friends?

​There is no dearth of effort to do just that. The pain of loss is acute enough to spur us to look for relief. We are ready to do anything that would give us a moment of peace. Some, of course, think of hurting the person who has caused so much pain; a few do – only to find that it does little to remove the anguish. Pain is pain, and it stays that way, no matter what vengeful things we plan or execute.
 
If you have lost a love, the ancient counsel was, go to a seashore or the mountains. Let nature take care of your grief. Today the options are more – and more varied. You can take a discount flight to the Mediterranean or Caribbeans. Recently I took a cruise to San Juan and Saint Kitts and could see the point of a change of air. Thousands flock there for a bracing change when there is a nip in the air.
 
You don’t have to be a person of leisure to do that. Now that much of the world is working online, you could probably attend to network collapse or client discontent from a table in the sand or the deck chair on a cruise ship.
 
Devarajan, an Indian American techie who lives near me, shared his pain that his wife, Sova, left him and started living with an Armenian colleague who worked on the next desk. He knew neither how to share the news with his family and friends in India nor how to face the ignominy of talking politely with his marauding colleague. “I went for a long trip in Italy, which was distracting. But, sadly, not distracting enough. I would be eating pasta roadside and would suddenly feel lonely and dejected. It was worse when I returned to my hotel at night.” He returned a week early to go back, miserably, to his accustomed desk.
 
Siobhan, an Irish redhead I meet often at the local library, told me of her equally humiliating experience of being practically abandoned on the church steps in New York, three days before a meticulously planned wedding to be followed by a lavish reception. She couldn’t bear to continue in the city and hurriedly took a job in Washington. “I like the relative isolation. None of the old friends, old associations. I live among strangers and, for months, carefully keep them as strangers. I had to adjust to an unfamiliar city while coping with an untried job. The stress gave me some relief in the initial months, but in two months I felt my depression returning. I cope as best as I can.”
 
Both avoided relations and friends and tried to fill their life with endless errands. It brought little solace beyond some distraction. We don’t always get what we want. Rather, with rare exceptions, what we want we don’t get. I wanted to study literature or philosophy, I spent years studying economics. I wanted to be a jurist or journalist, I ended up an executive and diplomat. Not unlike what happened to many friends.
 
I suspect many don’t realize the frustration of their desires because they never clearly articulate their desires, even to themselves. If you haven’t given a thought to what you want, you don’t notice that you aren’t moving anywhere close to it. It is truest when it comes to our heart’s desires. A vast number of people start relationships with people near at hand, someone who works with them, lives near them, knows their friends or relations. No wonder the relationships don’t always work out well.
 
What do we do then?
 
If you don’t want to turn your face away from life – as some do and turn pathetically to a cult or religion, or worse, a specious swami or bogus guru – but find meaning and pleasure in life itself, you have to find something that does not depend on anybody else or any outside event.
 
Professor Kowalski, a friend, tells me, “It takes a bit of doing. You have to think hard and settle on something that you truly enjoy. Is it music? Is it gardening? Is it cooking new things? Do more of it, learn more about it, fill your life with what gives you genuine and abundant pleasure. Whether it is writing poetry or playing the guitar, it can be your own source of peace and happiness. Nobody can snatch it away.”
 
The pain will always be with us. Heartaches will come our way, repeatedly. Relatives will prove insincere, friends will let us down, children will disappoint us. But nobody will be able to take away our joy in sketching a tree or singing a song. And that joy will last and grow, no matter whatever else goes wrong in our life. I may not be able to cure the world’s sorrow, but I can create my happiness. That is what we can live for.

What we dream at night evaporates at the first light of the day. Most often we can’t even remember a shred of it. It is what we dream during the day that fires our spirit and shapes our destiny.
 
Of all the people I have met, I have never known anybody in whom the flame of a dream burned more steadily but strangely as Adhip. We were all in college, naïve and inexperienced, and vague hopes of being doctors, engineers and lawyers were a dime a dozen, with a few who had eyes on government or commercial jobs. Not Adhip. He had a dream – that most of us thought was a quirk. He wasn’t thinking of a job at all.
He wanted to start ‘on his own.’
 
Others were skeptical of what they considered his grandiose ideas, but I was at least a more patient listener. What did he have in mind, I wondered. I had heard his father had started from scratch and built a massive engineering works that produced railway parts.
 
“Do you intend to start a factory,” I asked Adhip.
 
“No,” he laughed, “I want to do better.”
 
He explained that India had an opulence of varied cuisine, but the city had not a single classy restaurant that offered a variety of such cuisine, let alone a fusion of some. He had been taking cooking lessons from a skilled chef that his father employed. He planned to form his idea of a pioneering restaurant that would revolutionize the concept of food service business.
 
I had to give this lanky young fellow the credit for uncommon imagination, though I had no idea how he could pull off the idea, given the amount of credit and resources he would need. I told him I admired his entrepreneurial spirit and would like to know whatever he did next.
 
The moment we graduated Adhip made a modest start by initiating a coffee shop with a few select food items. I invited some college friends and went there for a party. Since I had meanwhile found a job, I could afford to decline Adhip’s gracious offer to be the host. I liked the cozy warmth of Adhip’s place and it was a new idea, long before Starbucks. Still, it folded in a few months because a competing chain opened a café nearby before Adhip could develop steady clients.
 
That did not deter Adhip’s spirit when I met him next at a friend’s birthday party. He had lost the capital his father had advanced him for the restaurant; he had started a business that did not require a capital outlay. He secured orders for small parts from manufacturing companies, which were then made by his father’s factory according to the given specification. Adhip supplied the finished parts to his clients, paid his father the cost of making them and kept a decent margin. His company, he told me, was independent of his father’s and he operated from a tiny office rented near his father’s plant.
 
Adhip’s business prospered. He took pains to understand his clients’ needs and supply parts that met specifications perfectly. His reputation grew and his clientele. When we had tea together, he mentioned that his father wanted him to take over the parental factory, but he preferred to run his own separate business. I could see Adhip was now quite successful in his new line of work. He seemed to have dropped his food service idea; I was too embarrassed to mention it.

I was out of the country for some years, and when I returned I called old friends including Adhip. He invited me to lunch at a new restaurant downtown. It was a large, modern restaurant with an unusual open look, located on a major corner, and I was received royally when I mentioned the host’s name. In a minute Adhip came and joined me – not from the entrance but from the kitchen! I knew instantly then that he had never given up his idea of a classy restaurant that could do well in the city. The buzzing restaurant, packed with diners, told me what Adhip modestly elaborated later: his was now the prime dining place in town.

​His father had chosen to retire, and Adhip had appointed a trusted friend, a qualified engineer, as a manager to run both his father’s old plant and his parts business. His focus was on providing the best value for money – the finest cuisine and ambiance – in the restaurant business.
 
I looked at Adhip’s radiant face as he spoke of his plans. I had underestimated him. He had remained steadfastly loyal to his adolescent dream.

A home may be a person’s castle, as the English told us, but an office is truly his badge of glory.
 
Unless you are Brad Pitt and can show a new girlfriend your $40 million Italian chateau (and infuriate an ex-wife, Angela Jolie, a co-owner!), or you are Opray Winfrey and can display a $100 million California home, you are better off trying to impress your friends by showing off your shining two or four-story office where you have a room to yourself. Sadly, that too is becoming doubtful these days, as many companies allot their executives little cubicles that just about holds a laptop rather than a spacious corner room – or ask them to work online from home.
 
My luck has varied and veered greatly. My trajectory through a variety of offices has been almost a story of Manikin in Wonderland.

​Fresh out of college, I found a job in a tire factory in the suburb. An intern, I was to first learn how things are done and work, hands-on, on the shop floor. I worked on all kinds of machines, large and small, and messed with all kinds of chemicals, dark and smelly. Office? The foreman got me a grimy stool and a grimier desk to write any notes. After a year of this, I felt like the Grand Panjandrum when I got a clean table in the central office.
 
Now I was engulfed by rows of clerks, like the phalanx of an endless army, working on stocks and cost control, unraveling the mysteries of FOB and CIF pricing. I had clean shirts and a decent chair of my own, and a restored sense of middle-class respectability. In three months, the thunderbolt struck. The boss took a fancy to my work and moved me overnight to a corner of his cavernous office, to work on a special project for him: absenteeism. My status was on the uptick.
 
In a year I caught somebody else’s fancy. I was moved hastily to the company’s headquarters in the city. To everyone’s disbelief and the dismay of my peers, I seemed to have suddenly ‘arrived.’ I was not only rubbing shoulders with the corporate honchos, I had, the surprise of surprises, a office of my own. It came with an elegant secretary, who came every morning with a tray of tea and cookies.
 
A few years later, I joined another company as the chief of a division and was rewarded with not just an absurdly large office but also a private restroom. It was a giant mystery to me why my private functions had to be guarded so carefully that I needed a restroom of my own, but the prevailing culture dictated that a boss had to be shrouded in the aura of privacy.
 
Some years later, I moved overseas. My boss said despairingly, “The moment I saw that blond woman hovering near your office, I knew your days were numbered.” Indeed I left precipitately and joined one of the six largest corporations in the US. It had a huge estate near Washington, close to the Potomac, and, more than my office, I loved exploring the woods around it. Instead of a sit-down lunch, I would ask the cafeteria for two sandwiches and walk through the oaks and birches until a deer came fearlessly near for my second sandwich.
 
When I joined a UN group, my office really became the planes and an assortment of hotels in unfamiliar cities. I learned to work in flight while savoring free wine and trained myself to disregard ambient noise and attractive seatmates. For relaxation, I memorized Spanish phrases and French idioms, knowing the lifesaver those would be in other lands.
 
Things changed dramatically when I joined the diplomatic corps. I had imagined attending cocktail parties in white ties and tails. Instead, I was sent to Haiti to track human rights violations and provide asylum to refugees. My virtual office became ramshackle churches and dilapidated hovels where hunted people hid, the only respite being my alternative office on coast guard cutters that retrieved fleeing refugees from sinking boats. I next went to Nepal, where for days my office was 9000 feet in the Himalayas, trying to find American hikers and mountaineers who had survived an avalanche.
 
Meanwhile, the digital revolution had come and stayed. When I joined the world’s biggest consulting group, they gave me a laptop and in effect told me to forget about an office. Unless clients wanted me to sit in their office! I loved the new freedom and wanted to make it complete: in two years, I gave up the job and became a consultant.
 
My major client had an office that was not a brick-and-mortar building at all, but sixteen boats in the Washington Marina. I sat next to the president’s office in a tiny cubicle, in the cozy, gently undulating boat, sipped my coffee and peered out the porthole at the ducks in the rippling water and birds in the cloudless sky.
 
Now I work at a huge rolltop desk that I brought along from India, in my own home, my castle, in the master bedroom – the best room -- that I have converted into my study, surrounded by books, on shelves, on chairs, on the floor, everywhere, with two large windows practically bringing the encircling oaks and their probing branches right inside, the afternoon sun glinting through the shiny leaves, and a strawberry margarita, frosting in a crystal glass my daughter gave me for my birthday, waiting both to quench my thirst and lift my spirits. Life, even in a pandemic, is dazzling and this is the best office I ever had.

It didn’t work out the way we expected.
 
We were close friends, all four of us. We were in college together; two of us even knew each other while in school. What a fabulous time we had, talking, playing, talking, sipping tea, talking, walking together. Talking we did most of all. We talked about our classes and our professors, we complained about our parents, we gossiped about our other classmates, we argued about politics. Most of all, we dreamed about the future. We talked about what we wanted to do and what we wanted to achieve.

​We had different preferences, of course, but I remember two things we all agreed on. We wanted to live our lives in our own ways, pursue our independent goals. We had seen our parents bullied by their parents or landlords or employers, and we thought such a life miserable and humiliating. We wanted none of it in our lives.
 
The other thing we wanted was to be able to help a few others. We liked the idea of being of help to our friends, our poor relatives, the people we saw sleeping on the streets with their small children. We wanted to be comfortable, but we wanted a few others to be comfortable with us. We yearned to be of help to others around us.
 
Looking back, I know we weren’t unduly idealistic. We weren’t dreaming of a revolution. We just wanted some basic things for a decent life. We had no idea how hard it was, in our world, even to achieve the minimum.
 
Our paths diverged when we came out of college, but we tried to keep in touch. Neel had good results and his parents were well-off; he went to a medical college. Khan competed and joined an engineering college out of town. Deep was as smart as anybody else but could not afford the luxury of years in the university; his father, about to retire from a tea company, persuaded his boss to hire him as a clerk. I was lucky to win a generous scholarship and went to the university.
 
In those days, it wasn’t easy to be in touch. There were times when we had scant contact or could not even reach one or the other even on the phone. I wrote letters, but soon realized the others weren’t eager to put pen to paper. Their replies were short, cryptic – or none. It became worse when Khan and Neel both went to work in other cities. Still we persevered.
When I found a job, I called them long-distance and, when any of them came to town, made sure Deep joined us. If nothing better, we met in pairs and sometimes we got a trio together. But the dream was always for the four of us to meet together again. It never happened.
 
When I went overseas, I sent a hurried note to all three, saying bravely I would come again and invite all of them to my apartment in Alipur. That too never happened. My father had died within a year of my departure and my mother too passed away. My visits to Kolkata, never frequent, dwindled further. I sold my unused apartment.
 
Two decades passed.
 
Deep had a gall bladder problem and met Neel, now a recognized surgeon. On an impulse they called me from Neel’s chamber, catching me close to midnight, just back from an emergency trip to Cuba. When I said I had a plan to visit Kolkata that winter, they enthusiastically suggested a meeting in Kolkata, promising that Khan too would join us.
 
We met, for old times’ sake, in the same old coffee house in north Kolkata where we used to gather. We had exchanged several messages meanwhile and I arrived early with great anticipation.
 
I was surprised to find Neel already there, but I was even more surprised to see him, affluent specialist, look so frayed and drained. In a few minutes, Deep turned up escorting Khan. Deep looked his usual trim self, though his hair and moustache had both turned gray. Khan was heavier, seemed older than his age, and would have been unidentifiable if he hadn’t come toward us with a familiar smile.
 
Even after so many years we retained an eager, vibrant link. We spoke happily about our days together. Then I asked if we were living the life we had dreamed about. Neel was a successful surgeon, but he seemed to find little joy in his success. He said his work had become just a “business,” and his reputation served to attract the wealthiest to his door, not the neediest.
 
Khan was now a celebrity, an engineer turned an entrepreneur, lately turned an affable, well-regarded politician, notably a success. Paradoxically, he saw his accomplishment rather differently: at every step he felt he had had to compromise, sacrifice principles he valued to achieve results he thought important. He said he began by thinking that he was helping people, but now he knew better. 
Deep had done well too in his tea company. He had risen to executive status, though he felt he had done so less by his punctilious work than by having to kowtow to petty, self-important bosses. He drew, he said, his satisfaction from his family, his two loving daughters, rather than an unprincipled business life.
 
I looked at the faces of my dear friends. None seemed truly happy or at peace despite their success. They were good people, but they lived with broken hopes and eroded dreams.
 
I was no model of success. I hoped I had gained over years the modest reputation of a helpful, friendly person. I liked that people came to me for assistance; I tried to do the little I could for them. Now, listening to my friends, I had a precious moment of troubling self-introspection. I wondered how many little principles I had quietly abandoned, how many causes, once cherished, I had gently let fall by the wayside. Just like them, just like many others.

The star of the headlines for a long time, the coronavirus, has been finally sidelined in my hometown of Washington. The election of a president will be the big news for the next several weeks. Sadly, it is no more of an uplifting story than a disastrous epidemic.
 
We are taken aback by the harsh mood of the election, the anger and ferocity of the campaigns. Of course, the stakes are high; the effort is to defeat the opposite side, preferably with a knock-out blow. But the bitterness of the adversity, the venomous charges levelled against the candidates, leave many of us stunned. Granted that the two sides will attack each other, but the air of hate and contempt is suffocating. I have lived through ten US presidential elections, seven of them at close range as a capital resident. I have not seen an election as acrimonious as the current one.
 
The world has taken a long time to go from the rule of a monarch (usually a drunk, whoring scoundrel) or of some aristocrats (typically marauding, sycophantic hoods) to the rule of the people. Aristotle called ‘democracy’ the rule of the mob, and that is the rule we, the ordinary people, want. But now the scoundrels and hoods are taking their revenge. From the US to India, certainly including the charming bastions of democracy like China and Russia, elections everywhere have become a money driven game of manipulation. You and I have a measly vote each, but from Koch brothers in the US and to the Ambani brothers in India business leaders have expert publicists and lobbyists manipulating thousands of voters. Not to forget political leaders who have an army of paid trolls influencing millions of minds through social media. Today the ‘selling’ of a president – or a prime minister -- is no different from the selling of soap or snake oil.
 
But even this atmosphere of animosity is less disastrous than the other part which is hardly noticed. The main idea of a presidential election is not the elevation of an individual, but the ‘electing’ of an option, the collection of ideas and policies of which a candidate is both an advocate and a symbol. How does the public make its choice if a candidate does not say anything about the policies he likes and, in fact, scorns the idea of talking about policies? Just as in India, where there was no talk in the last election about the terrible plight of farmers or the lagging economic progress, in the US there is no real discussion about the life-and-death issues like gross inequality or climate change or even budgetary profligacy.
 
The presidential election we are about to see will be like a polished play you can see on Broadway, where there will be drama and fanfare, concocted and choreographed. There will be excitement at regular intervals, exactly as you expect in a decent stage production. There will be heroes and villains, comic and tragic side characters, all played with breath-taking competence so that you can believe them. I expect there will also be small snafus and a couple of medium-sized bombs to keep you in suspense – with any luck, resolved by Supreme Court divinities, exactly along party lines.
 
What you will not see is a genuine look at the issues like stable income, inexpensive education and decent healthcare for the vast number of people in the country. What you will not have are solutions to the most horrendous problems, such as homeless people, helpless drug addicts, minimum-wage workers and their impoverished children. What you will not hear, if the last several years are any guide, any genuine, root-cause coping with the burning problems of widespread racism, police brutality and pockets of scandalous and growing poverty.
 
Does this seem an over-pessimistic portrayal? It is simply a realistic assessment of a society that is sinking slowly in the global ranking of social progress. According to the Social Progress Index 2020, where experts assess the relative quality of life in different countries, the US has dropped nine positions in the last nine years and is now 28th in the world. Its traffic fatality rate and sanitation facility and internet access are behind most advanced countries. Its universities are the best in the world, but its basic education ranks 91st, comparable to Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Its medical technology is the world’s finest, but it is 97th in providing health care access, comparable to Mongolia and Jordan.

​What happened to the country Reagan described as ‘the shining city on the hill’? How did it slide so far in the muddy valley? There is a lesson here for all of us, in the US or India. When you choose for leadership a glib talker with a false dogma of national power and a spurious promise of economic progress and then cater essentially only to your own power, the success of your party and the wealth of business groups that serve your interests, you are choosing the road to decline.
 
Elections come at rare intervals, but they demand a chance to be open and fair with people, share honestly your policies, explain them to the nation and not bluff people with false promises of national strength, military power and divisive strategies. You must humbly show your hand and let the voters choose. That is the ground rule for playing the game of democracy.
 
Kicking the chess board does not qualify as a style of playing chess. And a face-down board is the crest of a country that has fallen on its face.

A specter is haunting our world, the fearsome specter of zombies. We are already ravaged by a highly infectious virus. Now novels and films are telling us in creepy detail about these infectious, flesh-eating fiends – the Zombies.
 
Zombies are creatures in a human form, created by the reanimation of a dead body. In Haitian folklore – and in other Caribbean and African stories – a sorcerer or ‘bokor’ revives a dead body by magic or witchcraft and sets it to carry out his bidding. A zombie is unrelenting and ferocious, and it revels in human flesh. If it bites you, you get infected and you become a zombie too. Zombies don’t any longer have blood; they have a pus-like dark, thick liquid. They run in a predatory pack and overwhelm you with their number. They aren’t easily killed, because they are “undead”; a stab or a bullet won’t deter them. You must shatter their brain before they stop to function. In most stories, they nearly overrun humanity, which survives by ruthless measures to identify and destroy zombies all around.

The stories are wildly popular. More than the novels, films and serials have caught people’s attention and set their imagination on fire. No wonder. Unlike a social drama or detective thriller, there is a clearly identified villain right from the beginning, somebody dismal to despise. Unlike the elegant villains James Bond had to fight, Louis Jourdan to Christoph Waltz to Klaus Maria Brandauer, zombies are filthy to behold and convenient to loathe; there is special pleasure in their dispatch. Zombies never do a single decent thing; disgustingly, they keep clamoring to consume our flesh. They keep coming and slobbering, never stop, even when hurt or attacked, and so there is an enjoyable finality to a protagonist bashing its brain. It is a modern fairy tale, in which there are no fairies, but there is the mild tension of uncertainty, somewhat like Cinderella’s loss of a slipper, followed by the delicious finality of a savage slaughter of nasty zombies.
 
Zombies have no long-term plans to start a world-wide revolution, like Che Guevara, or take over the world, like the Bolsheviks. If they had, the story would get more complicated and I suspect it would lose some of its appeal that derives from its very simplicity. The zombies want nothing more than to have a pound or more of your flesh. They are childlike in their simple desire and childish in its expression; they simply want to come and bite you. They don’t even march up to you, they shuffle and slither to reach you. They do their very best to make themselves execrable. So, what a jolly celebration it is when our heroes take out their big guns to blow off the zombies’ silly heads. Or, lacking a handy gun, use a sledgehammer to crack them open for our delectation.
 
The zombies are packing people in because of their very ordinariness. Zombies are not like Dracula, King Kong or Godzilla, possessed of immense, immeasurable strength. Nor are they like vampires, x-men or werewolves, equipped with supernatural powers. Those qualities may make a villain impressive, but they also make a rogue distant. When a zombie comes shambling with no more than a craving to have a bite of you, you not only recognize its commonness and universality, you associate it readily with the covetousness of your greedy relatives, your cutthroat colleagues, even your own worst selves when faced with a competitive situation. Your heart exults when the zombies get their comeuppance and get their heads chopped.
 
It is also why the movies do so much better than the books. Words can only describe the final violence visited on the zombies. The screen can show it much better. With a wider screen, computer-graphics enhancement and greater technical finesse, one can show the eventual mayhem vividly and colorfully: the maimed body, decapitated torso, severed limbs, smashed head, dark liquid that spurts from a zombie’s body – all are minutely depicted and lovingly lingered on. No depiction, the pious churchgoer will recognize immediately, is closer to the vengeful Leviticus prescription for sinners, “fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth.”
 
Starting from a low-budget black-and-white flick fifty years ago, through books, graphic novels, big-star films and major serials capturing twenty million eyeballs, zombies have already captured the world. They keep coming, undead, undeterred, to grab our eyes and minds and fill them with mindless murder and mayhem. They tell us what we want to hear: that our adversaries can be not only defeated but quite annihilated. They give us the vicarious joy of breaking our enemies into pieces, crushing their skulls, dismembering their bodies, with a fearful diversity of murderous weapons. It remains only to replace those monsters in our minds with our chosen dearly-loved hate objects: bossy bosses, nasty neighbors, defiant employees, sassy servants, fez-wearing heathens, beef-eating infidels, even ungrateful children and undocile wives.

“My father left me and my mother when I was six. The memory of his face was a blur, but the reality of his absence very palpable. All my friends in school, in our little town near Chennai, had fathers; their fathers came to collect them after classes or to school events. Not mine. My uncle, my mother’s brother, was affectionate and acted as my guardian. But I did not have what my friends had, a father. I learned to live without one. But I felt a void.”

​Mirai poured another cup of tea for me and for herself and continued.
 
“There was a framed photo on the mantel that showed a young man with my mother, taken shortly after their marriage. I had heard that he was a brilliant engineer, who had taught in the university and done some research on his own. It was the research and some publications based on it that got him the position he was offered in some US university. He had left and never looked back. It was as if he had wiped clean the earlier part of his life.
 
“Every two or three years, he would visit India briefly, to meet his university colleagues and us. He would send some money periodically, but we hardly depended on that. My mother’s family was affluent, and we never ran short of living expenses. I went to good schools and then went to a well-known university. In all these years, barring the few hours he allocated us during his infrequent visits, he was no more than a shadowy presence in my life.
 
“It took me a long time to adjust to the reality that he had abandoned not just his wife, but also me, his daughter. He had carved out a new life for himself in a distant land, reportedly joined an international engineering group as their scientific advisor. We had no longer a role to play in his life."

​Mirai took a breath and added, “But he had a role, a negative role, in mine. I realized it when I graduated from college and the prospect of marrying came up. Among the eligible men I considered, one said that he had a good offer from an American company, located in Texas. I immediately told him No. I realized then the depth of bitterness associated in my mind with the country that had swallowed my long-lost father.
 
“The person I eventually married turned out to be an engineer. He worked for a construction group in India for many years and then went to work on a project in Kuwait. We had a comfortable life there and seemed well adjusted when the war with the US became imminent. We were about to return post haste to India when I received an unexpected letter from my father. He had maintained a tenuous connection with me over the years, an occasional letter on my birthday or in Christmas time. He knew of our need to leave Kuwait and suggested that we should immigrate to the US.
 
“To my surprise, he quickly filed the necessary papers and even offered to host us the initial months in his Maryland house. Three months later, I was living in my father’s home, with my young son and my husband, who started looking for a job. By then, my father was not only a partner in the large engineering firm where he had been working for years, he had also started a consulting firm of his own. He had initially suggested that my husband could work for him, but now he reneged on that assurance. I was disappointed, because my husband now faced the uphill task of find a job in an unknown city in an unfamiliar land.”
 
Mirai looked out the window and struggled with a painful recollection. Then she said, “My husband found a job after several weeks and we quickly moved out of my father’s home. I felt we had nearly outstayed our welcome. Curiously, the Dutch woman my father was living with now seemed more sympathetic to our situation than my father. I formed a good friendship with her and we continued to remain cordial friends.
 
“My mother had passed away while I was in Kuwait. My father was my only living parent, and when I had received his invitation to come to the US, I had hoped to develop a new and close relationship with him. I had dreams of retrieving the father I had lost as a child. I wanted to know him and take care of him. I also wanted him to know me, to help him build a relationship with my son and my husband. Now I knew that was not to be. He had done me a good turn. That was all. He did not want to get close to me, the only child he ever had. It hurt me, but I accepted that a somewhat distant link is all I could ever hope to have with him.”
 
Mirai put down her cup after a last sip. She sighed briefly and said, “When he died three weeks ago, I sat next to his bed and held his frail hand. No, he never became my father. He had no intention to resume a role he had forsaken years ago. But I wanted to be his daughter. I wanted to play that role as best as I could. I held his hand until the moment, late in the night, when he breathed his last. His Dutch partner whimpered. I remained wordless. I had done what I wanted to do. Sadly, but scrupulously, I had played my role, my daughter’s role. That was the only satisfaction I had.
 
“I gently dropped his hand, put on my jacket and walked slowly to my car outside. A pitiful, poignant chapter in my life had finally ended. I started the car.”