I did. But I was not happy with the translation and edited it a couple of times. I might have forgotten about the poem if it did not turn up some years later in a conversation with a close friend, Father Paul Detienne, a Jesuit serving in Kolkata. Aside from his religious erudition, he shared my admiration of non-religious French writers and was a superb writer in Bengali. We were both wordsmiths, and I remember doing a final draft of my translation following the discussion with him. I gave him a copy. He laughingly said he would place it on his desk where he can see it every morning.
 
Thirty years later I was a US diplomat in Haiti, trying to save a few refugees from among the human rights activists the ruling military junta was hunting down. I received great help from a brave Belgian priest, Father Hugo Trieste, who daily risked his life to assist people running for their lives. Sipping coffee in his modest home one day, I met Sister Ann, a nun who worked with him. Sister Ann was from the Philippines and was glad to hear that I had greatly enjoyed the five years I had earlier spent in her country.
 
Two weeks later Sister Ann invited me and the Father to her modest apartment for lunch. The lunch was memorable for the pleasant conversation and companionship we had in a very unpleasant time. It became even more memorable when I noticed a paper stuck on the dining room door. I got up to take a look and read a poem.

​I was stunned.
 
I was seeing my own translation after more than three decades. I knew it was my translation because, after much rumination and discussion, I had kept the double ‘never’ in the last line, because I felt it best conveyed the force of the original. I knew of no other translator who had done it the same way.
 
I asked Sister Ann how she had the poem. She said she had read it in the home of a French nun, who had seen it on the desk of a Belgian priest and got a copy. Sister Ann had liked it and asked for a copy. She stuck it on the dining room door, for she wanted to see it every day. She had no idea where the poem came from, no more than the French nun who had given it to her.
 
I could only surmise that Father Detienne had passed on my translation to someone who had liked the poem.
 
Evidently my translation had traveled far and touched a few hearts.

For years, when I went to school, perhaps even when I went to college, I had the recurrent dream of a fall. I dreamed that I was falling in a gorge. Or, going up a mountain, I slipped and started hurtling down. Or I was clinging to the side of a building and was about to lose my grip.
 
They were all discombobulating dreams. I would wake up and wonder why I had to endure the panic of a lost foothold or a missed grasp, and the free fall through a murky void. Someone who pretended to a deep understanding of dream symbols told me that a fall was really a sexual act, the slide representing a sinking into another body. I could not fathom why an ostensibly pleasurable act should leave me with the breathless agony of an unfolding disaster.

​Then I read Freud’s scintillating essay on dreams where he spoke of dreams as a mental device of wish fulfilment. He gave the example of a child who wanted to go on a boat in the lake, but was not allowed by his father and went to bed crying. He dreamed that he was on the boat, merrily crisscrossing the lake. The dream gave him peace of mind and he could get the untroubled sleep that he needed.
 
There is doubtless an element of truth in Freud’s theory. When I have lost a close friend, and rued that I would never see him again, on occasion he has appeared in a dream. It felt like he had reappeared as a form of solace. I love my daughters and I loved the time they were children and filled my heart with joy. Sure enough, they have appeared as little girls in my dreams.
 
Yet there are many strange dreams for which there is no easy explanation. More than once I have found myself in a large building, where a conference is going, and lost my way. Yes, I have attended a lot of conferences, but I have never been lost. Maybe it reflects not my being lost, but my fear of being lost.
 
I have also dreamed of being in planes and trains. In truth, I have traveled a lot. But I don’t understand why so many of my travel dreams are associated with some anxiety. Maybe, I wonder, many of those travels had an underlying tension of which I was not aware at the time.
 
It is the mystery of dreams that fascinates me. Don’t forget how long we have been trying to understand dreams. Egyptians recorded their dreams on papyrus 2000 years before Christ. Indians, a thousand years after that, in a remarkable anticipation of Freud, wrote in The Upanishadas of our secret desires appearing in dreams. Antiphon, the Athenian orator, possibly wrote the first book on dreams and Hippocrates, the great healer, thought we reproduce at night the images we gather during the day. Why this preoccupation with something so ephemeral as a dream? The answer is simple: people thought dreams were important.

​Dreams, depending on whom you listen to, were important in three different ways. Many native American tribes, and certainly Mexican tribes, believed that our ancestors spoke to us through our dreams. A modern version of this is the idea that what generations of human beings have experienced and suffered comes as a warning to us, in dreams that may help us and guide our steps.
 
Exactly opposite is the notion that our dreams are, not a distillation of the past, but an augury of the future. Widespread in many societies is the idea of dreams that foretell what is to come in our lives. The Talmud exhorts Jews to heed the lessons of their dreams and Samuel, the Hebrew prophet, slept in the Temple of Shiloh to better receive such lessons.
 
The third idea is that dreams are a direct message from God. The Old Testament recounts stories of dreams of divine inspiration; evangelists urge believers to listen to God’s message in their dreams. Saint Augustine believed himself redeemed by heaven-sent dreams. Against this, many Middle Ages priests thought of dreams as the devil’s temptations and Martin Luther spoke of dreams as messages of Lucifer. Even in Islam, Iain Edgar points out, dreams are key, for they are the main vehicle for conveying God’s instruction since the passing of the last prophet, Mohammad.
 
Regardless of where dreams come, God or the Devil, what titillates us most is what they mean. An extraordinary number of people have come up with interpretations that focus on the symbols you see in a dream and their meaning. Many of them are interesting, some of them are plausible, but none of them have any empirical basis. There are only two things one can say about dreams. First, that dreams have some continuity with our normal waking life. The concerns that agitate us during the day turn up at night in our dreams, though often in a bizarre or incoherent way. Second, even when dreams seem quite ‘discontinuous’ with our life, totally unreal and unconnected to our normal existence, they yield metaphorical or figurative insights that have a link to what is happening inside us. One day we may really be able to uncover those insights.
 
I have had highly erotic dreams. I thought they were certainly from God. I have had nasty dreams too, of getting lost or falling from a cliff. I put them down to the devil’s handiwork. Saint Augustine or Martin Luther may have a different point of view. I am reasonably content with the variation and would dearly like to know if any of it is ever going to come true. 

Thanks to my father’s job, we lived in a decent apartment in a large building. There were attached tennis and squash courts, a gymnasium and a library. The library was next to a Common Room, where residents could sit and chat or meet with visitors.
 
My school friends, with whom I loved to pass time, soon discovered that instead of meeting on the street, in a crowded park or in someone’s cramped living room, we could meet more comfortably in a corner of that spacious Common Room. Alternatively, since both my parents were out for work much of the day, we could simply meet in our commodious living room. My mother, if she were at home, not only liked to meet my friends but would make us some tea and serve it with cookies.
 
Naturally, my home, either the living room and the more sizable Common Room, became the default venue for my friends to meet. Several of us would gather most days in my home, to talk about whatever interested us. Sometimes we talked about the school and our recurrent gripes, sometimes about our dreams and ambitions. Mostly the ones who came were the classmates who lived nearby, though there were periodic visits from friends who lived farther away but came to join a lively discussion. Looking back, I think mother contributed to the attendance by her warm welcome of my buddies.
 
Among the regulars were Atul, whose father owned a pharmacy on the next street, and who liked to talk about the books he had read. He found an eager listener in me, as I too liked to read. There was Jiten, an avid sportsman, who occasionally played football with me and liked to talk about his ambition to be on the country’s Olympic team some day. Satya, who in reality had a long and complicated name bestowed by his family priest that none ever used, had wide interests, but seemed to focus mainly on travels and adventures in exotic places. He claimed that large parts of the world were still unexplored and he would one day find some of them and be a new Columbus.

We all had difficulty placing a label on Ashok, who came regularly to join us but spoke very little. He clearly liked being with us, and he was an attentive listener; he raised intriguing questions and made clever and interesting comments. He did it all in a quiet way, taking the least airtime, leaving us in no doubt that he had followed the discussion closely and was quite capable of adding a new dimension. His main interest seemed to be the subjects we were studying in the school, but he always brought up an angle that nobody had earlier touched upon.
 
I developed a special affection, almost an admiration, for Ashok over time and greatly valued his presence in the group. Others in the group had to recognize that he was clever and unusual, but I am not sure that they liked him as much as I did. He seemed never to talk about himself or his family, unlike the rest of us, and the only thing personal that I knew about him – only because I had specifically asked about it – was that he lived with his family on the street, really a narrow lane, that ran right next to our home.
 
We met so regularly that we got into the habit of referring to our group as a club. Most unexpectedly, the club went into a sudden and long suspension one autumn when I fell ill. I had had a nasty infection and, on the doctor’s advice, my mother advised my friends not to spend any time at my bedside. It was over two weeks before I was well enough to step out and declared free from contagion. It was a weekend and I wondered how I could best pick up the thread again when I attended school on Monday. It would be good to know what had transpired while I was absent and if there was homework I could do to prepare myself for new lessons.
 
It occurred to me then Ashok could be of immense help to me. He was a smart, diligent student who paid close attention to his studies and who, conveniently, lived next door to me. I remembered he had said that he lived on the street next to our home and his home was only a few hundred years from the corner. I took the short walk to the corner and entered the narrow lane. Though next to my home, I had never ventured into it earlier, for it had a shabby, unwelcome look.
 
It was dusk, and the narrow street had the dismal illumination of an old street lamp. I walked several hundred yards, but saw no entrance to a house. I walked back, searching again for an entrance I might have missed, but saw nothing. I was confused. Ashok had clearly mentioned the street and the proximity of his home to the corner. I retraced my steps, keeping an eye on the wall that ran a length of the lane, and walked back again without finding the entrance to a home. I was frustrated but determined.
 
I walked again, scrutinizing the wall with particular care. This time I noticed what looked like a small hole in the wall. It was so small and so low that I had labelled it in my mind as a rat hole. I stood and pondered. I had twice scanned the lane and not seen another entrance. I had to explore the present option, however improbable it seemed as the entrance to my classmate’s home.

​I gingerly stepped in. There were half-broken steps going down, into what seemed like a dungeon. I took two or three steps and stopped. Somebody was cooking down there, and thick puffs of acrid smoke seemed to choke me. I could not see further because of the smoke; I had begun to cough. I was not sure I could continue to descend, but I was reluctant to abandon my search. However unlikely it was that Ashok, or any human being could live down there, I raised my voice and shouted, “Ashok! Ashok!”
 
In less than a minute Ashok materialized out of the smoke, took hold of my hand and started walking up the steps with me. He did not say a word until we had passed through the hole in the wall and were standing in the street.
 
He said, “I am so glad that you have recovered from your illness. I hope you are feeling better.”
 
He never let go of my hand and kept walking until we were at the entrance to my home. We entered the building and walked into our living room and sat down.
 
Ashok looked at my face, “I am so glad to see you again, my friend.”
 
We sat silent for a while and then talked about many things, as my mother brought each of us a cup of tea.
 
We never talked about the rat hole and the dungeon.
 
The memory has not left me yet.

​It was a home that beckoned me in my dreams.

It was really a tiny single-floor brick house, with three small bedrooms and a decent living room, and a corridor at the back leading to a fair-sized kitchen. It was the home from where my father biked every morning to the university where he worked. It was the place where my mother went to live as a young bride, away from Kolkata where she had gone to college. It was also the place she came back to from Mure Memorial Hospital with a baby in her arms – me. My cherished photograph is of a playful girlish baby in the lap of a demure young woman: the mother seems absorbed by her new plaything, and the baby looks content to be the star of the moment.
 
I was indeed happy in that home. Besides mother, there was a soft-voiced, story-telling grandmother to spoil me and two extremely indulgent aunts whom I never thought to place a step below my parents. My aunts were the principals of two main schools in town, and, when I grew up a little, I loved to visit their schools and watch them in action. I would sit in a corner of the principal’s office, armed with two or three interesting books, quietly watching my aunt instruct a novice teacher or counsel a wayward student. The aunts were caring people, who loved to help pupils and pedagogues alike, and left me with a lofty impression of the teaching process.
 
Nagpur was always a large and important city, but it had a small-town charm. It took its name from the Nag river, but nobody could explain why the city and the river carried the name of snakes, for none was to be seen anywhere. The city had earlier the name of Fanindrapur, from the hood of a cobra, and the local newspaper haughtily called itself Fanindramani, the iridescent gem on the serpent’s hood that shed light in surrounding gloom. Cars were scarce; bicycles were plentiful; mostly people walked, talked and gawked. Nagpur was a friendly city.
 
Mother was a social person, and she missed her friends and relations in Kolkata. When father received the offer of an interesting job in Kolkata, they returned happily to Kolkata. Though we lived in Kolkata ever after, the family’s link with Nagpur did not cease. My aunts continued to live in Nagpur for years, and I visit them during vacations. I loved being with them and enjoyed being in that small brick house. The change from a big, bustling metropolis like Kolkata was refreshing. I had a circle of friends in Nagpur and I basked in the vast social network of my aunts. I enjoyed the social events, the meticulously maintained parks, the impressive zoo.
 
Then my aunts moved out of Nagpur, and I became preoccupied with my studies. When I took a job, it entailed some travel and I once passed two days in Nagpur. I tried to locate the house where I was born, but had no success. The city had changed a lot.
 
Years passed. I had moved to the United States and now lived and worked in Washington. By an unexpected turn of events, I had a project to manage in India for several months. I was located in New Delhi, but I nursed the hope of visiting Nagpur.
 
An old friend from Nagpur invited me to visit and I accepted with alacrity. I nourished a faint hope of locating the house where I was born and which had meant so much to me. When I told my friend of my yearning, he asked for details. I had little. My father had died, and my mother only recalled the name of the area, Civil Lines. No street name, no house number, no major landmark.
 
The next morning, I scoured Civil Lines, a large area, but did not see anything that I could recall from my childhood memory. By mid-afternoon both the driver of my friend’s car and I had realized the foolhardiness of our effort. I asked the driver to go and have his lunch, leaving me in a roadside tea shop to sip a brew and mull my misfortune. The shopkeeper spotted an unfamiliar face and came to chat. He was a genteel graybeard with a kind, wrinkled face, and, when I said I was visiting from Delhi, asked if I had taken the train. I replied that I had come by a plane. Then, in a blinding flash, at the mention of a train, the neurons in my brain started firing furiously in a new direction. 

​My mind went back forty years. While I sat in my aunt’s office in the school, just a few steps from our home, and read my books, every time I looked up at her, I saw an open window behind her. I remembered, miraculously, that I sometimes saw a train pass by. Then, I figured, there must have been a train track behind the school. When the driver returned after his lunch, I asked him if there was a road parallel to the train track. There was. Could he please drive along that road slowly? He would. As he drove, I suddenly sat up straight after a few miles and asked him to stop.

​There was a large building that could have been a school. I got out of the car and walked up to a policeman in blue duds smoking a cigarette. I asked him about the building. It was a police barrack, he told me.
 
“Was it always a police barrack?” I persisted.
 
“It was always a police barrack,” he replied. “I live here. I know it has been a police barrack for the last twenty years.”
 
“I need to know what it was forty years ago.”
 
“Forty years!” He was flabbergasted. “I have no idea. We have a neighbor who is 86. Maybe he knows.”
 
We walked over to the next house and the policeman offered a cigarette to the old man before asking, “This man wants to know what this police barrack was forty years ago.”
 
The old man took a quick glance at me and said, “It was a school.”
 
I thanked the two men, took a sharp turn left and walked sixty yards.
 
I stood in front of a tiny single-floor brick house. I rang the bell. A young woman came out and I explained that I had lived in the house years ago. She smiled and invited me to come in and look. She even offered to make me a cup of tea. She showed me the living room and three small bedrooms, then took the corridor and walked with me into the kitchen. It looked just the same kitchen I had once entered with my grandmother and the aunts.
 
As she made tea, I almost had the illusion of being a small boy again, watching my mother make tea.

The little girl liked to collect the mail from the mailbox outside their apartment. 

She was just six and not allowed to step out of the apartment by herself. Through the glass pane in the front door she would see the tall mailman deposit the mail every day, usually a little before noon, when she had her lunch with her grandmother. There the mail lay until the late afternoon, when her mother returned from work and emptied the mailbox. On the rare occasion she was late in returning, and especially if a package was visibly popping from the small mailbox, her dad would open the mailbox and bring in the letters.
 
She saw how much interest her parents had in the mail. There was the occasional letter for her grandmother, but her mother received the most mail, from her friends in the northern town where she lived earlier and apparently had many friends. Her father received an occasional note from his brother in the army, but he seemed to prize it greatly. Then there were the bills, which sometimes caused an upset, especially if it was something her mother had bought or a utility bill that suggested to father that mother or grandmother had been using too much gas for their cooking.
 
So, one day, it felt like an adventure, when nobody was watching, for the little girl to quietly open the door, pick up the mail and place it on the center table in the living room. Nobody noticed the difference. She did it again the next day, and the day after. She always picked up the mail.

Two weeks later she went to pick up the mail, and there was a single item, a postcard. Just as she was about to place it on the center table, her mother came in, saw the postcard and took it from her. One look at the postcard and her face went white. She sat down in the nearest chair and placed her face in her hands. The girl knew something was wrong, but did not want to ask her mother. The girl stood quietly while her mother remained immobile in the chair for a long time. The grandmother entered, saw her distraught daughter and went quickly to her side to ask what was wrong. It was then, as her mother silently handed over the postcard to the grandmother, that the girl heard the word for the first time. Talaq. Her father had divorced her mother by just writing the word thrice in the postcard. That was legitimate in Muslim law in the country.
 
The girl had sensed earlier that her father was not a very popular person in the household. But now, given the way he had taken his leave, his name was poison. It was no longer kosher to mention him, ask about him or want to know about him. The accepted way was to pretend he did not exist. More, as if he had never existed.

​But that was her father. That was the man who kissed her before he went out and kissed her again when he came in. That was the man who picked her up, held her close to his breast, hugged her every day. She knew he loved her.
 
She did not know what was wrong with him or what wrong he had done to her mother. She knew he was a handsome, loving man who loved her. When he held her in his firm hands, she knew he loved her more than all others. She knew for sure that she was precious and lovable in his eyes and he cherished her.
 
Twenty years had passed. She was now a young woman, beautiful and self-possessed. A young and talented man loved her and they were shortly going to marry and start a family. Everything looked perfect. Her mother, now a much older woman, had never had another close relationship, and depended solely on her for a close family tie.
 
In twenty years, her mother had never mentioned her father. She knew that nobody in the family had ever mentioned him again, if only to respect her mother’s wishes. But in her mind her father remained, a shadowy but vibrant presence, a handsome, age-defying face, strong and loving arms, the sound and feel of his repeated kisses on her childish cheek.
 
She wondered how she could find in the city – or, in any city of the world, for he may have moved – a man of whom she had no particulars save his name. The only person who might have any more details would be her mother. Would she share them? She took courage in her hands and decided to broach the subject with her mother. She asked, very quietly, one day if her mother had heard anything from her father in the two past decades? No, said her mother firmly, then added that, if he had written, she would have burned the letter unread. She still persisted and asked if any of his brothers or sisters ever connected with her. She said he did not many relations, and none in the country. She knew then it was a closed door. She would never see or hear or touch her father again.
 
And yet the missing father remains. At the very center of her being. He comes unbidden in her thoughts and occasionally in her dreams. He picks her up, raises her high, says how tall she has grown, then hugs and kisses her before he places her back on the floor. She has nobody she can tell about those recurrent, forbidden dreams.
 
That is why she chose me, almost a stranger, to talk about the man who once walked so majestically through her life.