The train wasn’t crowded but the woman who entered in Baltimore chose the seat opposite me. I could easily guess the reason: the overhead rack near me was empty and she could easily place her large suitcase. She was a slender young woman, probably Asian, dark hair in a braid, a designer tote on her left shoulder. Since the suitcase looked heavy, I made a gesture to suggest I could help her lift the suitcase to the rack. She paid no notice and lifted the suitcase herself.

As she sat down, she spotted the handbag next to me with its large load of papers and said politely, “I’m afraid I have left no space on the rack for your handbag.”
 
I said, “No matter. I will be working on these papers, and I’d rather keep the handbag next to me.”
 
She thanked me and asked if I was headed to Washington.
 
“Yes, I live and work there. What about you?”
 
“I was living in Baltimore with my brother, but now I am moving to Washington.”
 
She spoke clearly but with an unusual accent. There was a charming lilt.
 
I had a thick report in my hand; she had a thin book in hers. None of us seemed faithful to the printed word.
 
“Do you like living in Washington?” she asked.
 
“Yes, I find it a pretty and lively city, with good museums and active theaters. It is no longer true to say, as John Kennedy once said, that it was southern in its culture and northern in its hospitality.”
 
She said, “I hope to be near a university, for I want to take some language courses. I will be doing international work and languages might help.”
 
I asked, “Do you know where you will live?”
 
“I have taken an apartment on short lease. I will look for a permanent place once I am familiar with the city.”
 
I said, “You don’t sound like a native of the land. Do you feel quite accustomed to the country?”
 
“Not really. I am still learning the ropes. Also, I lived with my parents earlier, and the last three years with my brother. Now I will live by myself for the first time.”
 
I laughed, “That should be quite an adventure.”
 
She mused, “I may feel a little lonely at the start.”
 
“Possible, but unlikely. Your new work will help you know new people. There are lots of things to see and do in Washington, and you will meet a variety of people as you go around and do things.”
 
“I hope you are right,” she said. “Frankly, I am a little nervous. There will be quite a few things to get under my belt.”
 
“Don’t be. You can take your time and pick up the threads little by little. I promise you an interesting time.”
 
I was enjoying talking with her. She seemed bright and vivacious. She had a disarming combination of calm and candor.
 
We were not in an express train and could have a pleasant conversation for nearly an hour. When the train entered Union Station in Washington, I shook her dainty hand, took leave and said that I wished our paths crossed again.

​Liam, my Swedish colleague, had just narrated his short, eventful train ride over the weekend. Clearly, he hadn’t been able to put the Asian co-traveler out of his mind in the last several days. A good friend, he wanted to share over coffee what weighed on his mind. It was also possible, who knows, that he wondered if another Asian could be of some help.
 
I had no help to offer. Only a question, “Why didn’t you ask her for a telephone number? Or an email address?”
 
Liam said, “I hesitated. I thought my words, even my manner, had shown a clear streak of interest. I didn’t want to push my luck. I gave her my card, but I don’t think she will ever call me.” He added morosely, “She is Asian, I believe; she will never be so forward as to call me.”
 
“My friend, you should have at least wheedled out of her where she was going to work. Looking for her would be like searching a needle in a haystack in this big city.”
 
Liam said ruefully, “I didn’t realize then how her thought would haunt me.”
 
He had hardly finished when there was a knock on my office door. The young Cambodian woman who had just joined my section that week came in with a file.
 
I was about to introduce my colleague to the fresh staff member when something strange happened. Liam jumped up and nearly dropped his coffee cup. He and my new assistant looked at each other as if they had both been electrified. At long last, she smiled demurely.
 
However unnecessary, I formally introduced them both. Then said, “Why don’t you two talk while I go and arrange another round of coffee for us all,” and quickly exited.
 
I tarried purposely. There was no hurry. None at all.

Now when I visit my hometown, Kolkata, I ask for an Uber ride and get my wish in five minutes. I pay no more than a dollar or two to arrive anywhere in the city. It is better than a chauffeured car, for the driver changes every time; given any luck, they tell me their unique stories, some sad and some upbeat, but always better than a stimulating podcast. In the past, when I used a company car as a corporate honcho, the drivers maintained a deferential silence. It was no fun. I preferred to drive my private car rather than endure their cagey company.
 
But most of my days in Kolkata had nothing to do with four-wheeled comfort. Nor with two-wheeled locomotion, for my mother firmly forbade riding a bicycle in Kolkata’s congested roads and erratic traffic. My family never had a car, and I would have laughed at the idea that it was a deprivation. Most of the places I wanted to go, my friends’ homes, I walked. Walking seemed fun; there was so much to see in a lively, bustling city. It was more fun if a friend was walking with me. The greater the distance, the longer the exhilarating talk we shared.

When I needed transport, because either the place was remote or the time was short, the first thing that came to mind was the tram – what Americans call a streetcar. The trams were clean, comfortable and quite plentiful. They moved slower than cars, which in reality lent them a certain elegance. Also, unlike cars that weaved left and right through traffic, they moved majestically along straight tracks. Because the tram was a metal vehicle that moved on metal tracks, it made an awful racket as it moved, but it was hardly bothersome in a perennially raucous city. I rather liked the tinkling of its bells as it stopped and started.
 
Like the society is served, the trams had a class system. You paid less than a cent for the privilege of first-class comfort; the second class, which did not have cushioned seats, was even cheaper. When I moved to a school further from home, I was given money to travel by the premier class, because Mother had a mortal fear of my rickety frame in a crowded conveyance. I often used the inferior class and saved the fare differential to buy candy.

​The buses were a more proletarian affair, a ramshackle tribute to India’s rugged entrepreneurial spirit. The vehicles were of ancient vintage, invariably smelly and indifferently maintained. Their driving quality was highly variable, as too was the speed, from the excessive to the breakneck. Though there were assigned stops, they stopped wherever they liked, to pick up passengers to fill the buses to their rafters. But buses went anywhere and everywhere, and for many passengers they were a lifesaver.
 
My effervescent memory is of the passengers who traveled with me, their ebullient mood and witty asides on street events or the day’s headlines. Every venerable politician who had the misfortune to be in the news was given a sarcastic name and every screen star who had featured in a recent release became the center of a salacious story, the more far-fetched the better received. When in college, every time I traveled with a female classmate and sidled closer to share a whisper, there would be jocular references to Romeo-Juliet or some such romantic pair. When I became friendly with an American girl, a neighbor’s daughter, our trips invariably drew notice and good-natured remarks. She sat usually in a seat marked, gallantly if outmodedly, as ‘for ladies,’ and I hung on to a bar to be near her, only to hear tongue-in-cheek remarks about my ‘fidelity’ and ‘protectiveness.’ I resented those with youthful impatience, but now I recall them with greater charity.
 
Just as vibrant a memory is those of the interesting people who worked on the buses and trams. I remember a tall, strong-built Sikh conductor who always stopped the bus a little longer if he saw me coming and, as I came closer to the entrance, put out a hand to grab my wrist and help me in. There was an elderly tram conductor, bearded and elegant, reverentially called Hassan Sahib by all, who greeted passengers like a maître d’hôtel and patted me on the shoulder as he checked my ticket. On the route to Chowringhee, I made friends with a young conductor, Saha, who said he was saving money to go to college, so that he could become an engineer and educate his two younger sisters in the village. I hope his dreams came true.
 
Last year I was sharing these recollections with a journalist friend, Alpana, who suggested that we take an early morning tram and make a long trip to the northern part of the city where I lived for many years. We arrived in the tram depot at dawn, to be told by two conductors that the first tram would still take fifteen minutes to roll out. They graciously suggested a bench where we could wait. In five minutes, like a miracle on that cool winter morning, emerged another conductor with two steaming cups of tea. “Please drink our tea while you wait for the first tram,” he said.
 
Tea never tasted better. When I went to thank the host conductors and pay for the tea, they politely refused to take the money. They said, with a simple earnestness that will stay forever among my best souvenirs of Kolkata, “You are our guests.”

At a cocktail party last week, the mink-draped woman next to me complained acidly that her husband wouldn’t buy her a Rolex Yacht-master watch that she craved for her birthday. Why that watch in particular, I asked. Did she sail often that a $40,000 watch would help her nautical ventures? Rather it was the price itself that she found the most attractive in the watch. It would have been, in her mind, the measure of her husband’s devotion.
 
I love a gift. Who doesn't? But my taste was very plebeian.

​When young, I used to get some gifts on my birthday. Of all such gifts, I loved books the most. I would receive shirts and chocolates, but nothing in my view matched books. I could read them and go back and read them again; it was a gift that kept on giving. I thought it was more precious than any other gift, certainly better than shirts and chocolates.
 
On an occasion, I remember I was bemoaning after a birthday party that I had received only four books, when my mother serenely tried to console me by saying that I had received three board games. Ungratefully and inconsolably, I said I would have preferred to receive fewer games and more books.
 
What books meant to me came back with force when I recently attended the memorial meeting of a childhood friend who had just passed away I sat there and went over in my mind the events and incidents I had shared with him. The cricket matches where we had competed ferociously, the comical games we had played at childish parties, the interminable fights we had about politics and literature. But, I was astounded, the memory that kept vividly hovering on my mind was the gift his ever-smiling, soft-spoken mother had bestowed on me in my eighth birthday party: a book by Abanindranath, whose superb literary skill, I was to later find, had somehow been obscured by his artistic legerdemain.
 
My preferences have broadened since then. I have learned to appreciate thoughtful gifts of other kinds. My daughters have given me delightful records and film collections, my brothers, who live in a different land, have supplied me with exotic cologne and spiced tea, my friends and neighbors enriched me with handwoven cardigans, artisanal products and even beautiful (not Yacht-master) watches.
 
Perhaps the most memorable gift that I ever received was one that had unusually dramatic consequences. I was the US consul in Nepal, working in my highly secure office in the Kathmandu embassy, when one of the marine guards came rushing to tell me that I had received a letter-bomb. Apparently, I had received an oversized box, carefully gift-wrapped, that revealed metallic wiring inside in the x-ray machine which scrutinized all incoming mail. (The unique 18-years-long letter-bombing career of Ted Kaczynski, the brilliant mathematician turned bomb-maker who had killed three persons – professors and officials – had just ended.)
 
Not all my official decisions could have pleased everybody, certainly not the visa requests I had turned down, but I could not imagine having enraged anybody enough to attract a bomb. I turned over political decisions in my mind and couldn’t locate one that could have triggered a plan for bodily harm.
 
The mailroom personnel had promptly alerted the security personnel, who followed their protocol and very carefully, with suitable equipment, removed the package to a safer area. Then came the bomb disposal people in their special gear and with a panoply of delicate instruments. They gently removed the tying ribbon and folds of the colorful wrapping paper. Inside was nothing more murderous than a large-sized illustrated book of poems. Even such looks can be deceptive, so the bomb specialists carefully opened the book. Inside was a brief handwritten letter, attached to the first page of the book with a somewhat large paper clip, which must have given the x-ray machine the impression of an incriminating “wire.”
 
The security people brought the letter to me to ascertain if I knew the author and the missive was genuine. The letter was from a friend who worked for the UN. It said, “Dear Manish, I am leaving tomorrow morning for a long tour in west Africa. I remembered your birthday is next week. Perhaps this book of poems, which I have enjoyed so much, will add to your birthday cheer. Best wishes.”
 
That was perhaps the most complicated gift I ever received – but not the most beautiful. That credit must go somewhere else.
 
Some years ago, my neighbors, a young couple, were kind enough to invite me for dinner on my birthday. At the end of a delicious meal, their little girl, six, who was learning origami, shyly walked over to me, gave me first a hug and then two spectacular gifts: two small paper birds, one red and one white. Those two birds still sit on my desk and I look at them every morning. I don’t know what kind of birds they are, but they are tiny and they are beautiful. Though made of paper, every morning, in tandem with the birds outside, they seem to sing. My heart sings too.

I was in downtown Washington to hear a lecture at Brookings and it was close to one when I came out. People were streaming out of their offices to grab a quick lunch. I wasn’t hungry and walked desultorily down 19th Street. It was a nostalgic jaunt because I had lived in an apartment on the street before I bought a house and moved out. The street had changed; several stores and restaurants I knew well had changed hands and names. I walked some more blocks and came to the Pennsylvania Avenue corner. I looked up at the large colonial-style building on the left. The two windows on the second floor belong to a large office room I occupied for some years.
 
“Manish!” I was startled to hear my name called out. 
 
I turned to see a tall, gaunt man in his fifties, chestnut hair graying at the temples, in an incongruous combination of dated khaki chinos and a fashionable blue blazer. His horn-rimmed glasses helped me place him, though his appearance hadn’t changed much beyond the color of his hair.
 
“Hugh!” I exclaimed happily. Hugh was always an interesting person.
 
“What are you doing at the scene of your crime?” he asked, in his typical jocular fashion, referring to the fact that we had both worked in the office I was looking at. This is something I like about Washington: one often encounters interesting people.
 
When I told Hugh that I was doing nothing of importance, he promptly suggested that we have a drink together and celebrate our chance reunion. He led me to a small Peruvian restaurant where, it came back to me when I entered, I had dined a few times. I ordered what I always order in a Peruvian bar, Pisco Sour, and, when Hugh followed suit, we also asked for two plates of Lomo Saltado.
 
Hugh knew that I had joined diplomatic service and asked me what I had been doing. As I was talking, the waiter, a young Mexican, brought the food and drinks and placed them between us. When I finished, Hugh called the waiter and said he had served only one drink and one plate of food. I was taken aback, for, though I was not paying close attention, I thought I had seen him bring a pair of drinks and food. Hugh pleasantly suggested that the waiter might have absentmindedly left the other drink and plate on another table. The waiter came back in a moment and said apologetically that he had indeed left them on another table by mistake and served us both.

​I was still confused and told Hugh that I had the vague impression that the waiter had initially brought the order correctly. Hugh then confused me further by saying that the waiter had indeed brought the order correctly in the first place. Hugh fixed a gaze on me and suggested that I check the order again. While I held my drink in my hand, I noticed that my plate of food had disappeared. I couldn’t believe my eyes and I said it.
 
Hugh said, “If you can’t believe your own eyes, I suggest you close them for a minute, then open them slowly and check what you find.” I did. When I looked, I saw two drinks and two plates of Lomo Saltado!
 
I sat speechless. I wondered if two sips of Pisco Sour had made a curious difference to my vision – or my mind.
 
Hugh sat in front of me with a benign smile. Then he said, “Let me tell you what I do these days. I do magic.”
 
I felt spellbound. I muttered, “How can it be? You didn’t even leave your seat once.”
 
Hugh offered a gentle reproof, “You didn’t notice. I got up to take off my coat and hang it up.”
 
I was still mystified beyond words. How could a whole plate of food appear and disappear, not to mention a glass of Pisco Sour! I didn’t ask Hugh how he did it, for by now I was even more fascinated by the question of how my friend, a competent economist, had turned himself into a skilled magician.
 
It was quite a story. Hugh had taken his young son some years back to a school event where a magician performed. The son was greatly intrigued and wanted to meet the magician. Hugh took his son backstage and met the Turkish magician who went by the name, The Magus. The conversation was spirited, and the magician invited Hugh to a performance in a nightclub. This time the repertoire was quite different from the fare that the magician had presented at the school. Hugh was impressed; in fact, he was hooked. Later, he had several drinks with the magician and broached the idea of taking lessons.
 
He performed with the magician in a few clubs and got a good reception. The Magus lived in California and preferred to perform on the west coast; he went to other cities rarely, only when the remuneration was attractive. He graciously invited Hugh to come to California and perform occasionally with him, but advised that Hugh should hone his skill independently in his own town.
 
That is what Hugh has been doing, apparently with notable success.
 
Hugh was always an interesting person, but now he had a huge collection of amusing anecdotes from his performances with a large variety of groups. We sat and drank for a long time and when we left Hugh made it a point to tip the Mexican waiter exorbitantly.
 
As we said goodbye, he asked how I intended to go home. I disclosed that I had a car in a nearby parking lot.
 
He smiled and said, “My friend, you can’t drive home unless you use your car key,” and placed the car key in my palm.
 
I had no idea how and when the key had moved from my pocket to his.

Let me begin with a cruel declaration. When many of us die, we close a book that has never been opened.
 
Nearly 60 million people die each year, 20 million from heart problems and 10 million from cancer. Another 10 million die from respiratory, digestive and childbirth problems. This year another 200,000 are expected to die from the pandemic.
 
Suddenly a stealthy infection has brought death remarkably close to us. Friends, relatives, colleagues and neighbors have been dying at short notice. We had read of plagues in novels and history books, plagues that ended families and emptied cities. It was a distant specter. Now it is close at hand. A murderous pestilence whose touch is toxin and breath is death.
 
The worst is that we know little about the disease. We know of people who take all precautions – as my daughter did – and still can’t avoid infection. Every day seems like a game of Russian roulette, entirely a matter of chance whether we fall a hapless victim. Hospitals have no medicine; doctors have no cure. It is a roll of the dice whether you recover – with all your organs intact.
 
Dying is an unpleasant prospect. But so is living under conditions that to many does not merit the name of living. That is why prisoners who are confined for life often get desperate and sometimes take their own life. Some countries are inhuman enough to confine prisoners in solitary cells for lengthy periods. People have a better chance to overcome such odds when they have the hope of eventual release.
 
Many of us have lived under the rigor of a painful discipline for nearly a year. The realistic hope for release – when we can go where we please, meet whomever we want to see – may take another six months. That is the hope that sustains us and keeps us going.
 
But there is the larger question of what waits for us when the release date finally comes. What kind of life awaits us when the misery of our present confinement ends? It seems attractive in comparison to the limited ambit we are now allowed. But how attractive is it really is?
 
How, for example, does it compare with the dreams we had when we were children? Remember the bright skies and wide horizons that seemed then to hold infinite possibilities, when we believed ourselves capable of achieving the impossible. Remember too the school days when the classrooms seemed like waiting rooms, whence we would venture out into the world and conquer it with our brio and bravado. And then remember the college days, when smarter and worldly-wise, we still dreamed of a winnable world, where our earnest enthusiasm and diligent devotion would earn both recognition and rewards. We had always looked forward to a life of many possibilities, of meaning and satisfaction.
 
Then how have we ended up in a life so very limited, when our only satisfaction is a word of condescending approval from the boss, a minor increment to our benefits, an invitation from a less congenial colleague or neighbor, a wayward daughter’s improved grades, bountiful likes on your vapid entry in social media, or your snobbish cousin’s patronizing comment on your new sofa. How did we, who once aimed so high, are now content to bend so low and accept the trifles that life, like a snooty monarch, deigns to throw at us? When did we, like Esau in that shabby Genesis story, sell our birthright for a mess of pottage?

​Admittedly, our life is limited now. Our little joys, not to mention our oversize plans, are all suspended. We are confined by four or eight walls, precluded from seeing a coveted game or wolfing a restaurant favorite or hugging the huggable person hitherto forbidden. But this is a good time to hark back to our ambitious dreams, our childlike hopes of a lively, significant, consequent life, in which we do what seems meaningful to us, in some little way contributing to life around us, adding in some little measure to the happiness of people we know and love, and ask how can be move a little bit in that direction.
 
We are not immortal, though we tend to overlook that eventuality, and a cruel virus has knocked on our doors to remind us of our unpredictable mortality. We want to live, but when the inexorable bell rings our departure time, like an insistent train conductor who wouldn’t leave without us, we want to be able to think that we have lived – even a tiny fraction of the life we dreamed to live – before we leave.
 
It would be a pity if an unseen virus, or any other of myriad causes, closes the book of our life before we have ever opened it.

​Our quiet and reserved neighbors in Kolkata, the Thorntons, New Zealanders who referred to themselves as Kiwi people, had just moved out. My father said his next colleague, an American, would move in shortly with his family.
 
Ten days later I was struggling with my high school homework when the doorbell rang. A pleasant-faced but brusque-mannered woman in her thirties asked if I understood English and, when I nodded, wanted to speak with my mother. I explained, in English, that my mother worked and was never home during the day. Surprised that an Indian housewife worked outside her home and an Indian boy spoke English, she asked for a favor. Could I please come and explain something to her two domestic employees that she hadn’t been able to convey.
 
Both the employees, a cleaner and a cook, said they understood the Thorntons’ English but were befuddled by her accent. I explained the instructions in both Hindi and English, and then suggested to Edna, who had meanwhile told me her name, that she needed to speak to them slowly and perhaps with a clipped accent. She appreciated my help and suggestion, but felt that, as a true New Yorker, she would have a tough time altering her speaking style.
 
Then, in a friendly gesture, she offered me a glass of Coca Cola and watched wide-eyed as I drank it unhesitatingly. When she asked, I explained that, though I had never seen Coca Cola, let alone drink it, I had seen its ad in every issue of the Life magazine and trusted it to be a pleasant drink.
 
Then she said she would like to teach me a game that she loved but hadn’t been able to play in Kolkata, not knowing who knew English well enough. The game was Scrabble. She warned me that she was a skilled player, and I shouldn’t mind losing a duel with her. “You will get better as you play with me,” she added encouragingly. We started. She was a little amazed that I used words she hadn’t expected me to know and one time had to consult a dictionary when I applied a longer word she didn’t know. Edna didn’t know that words and their structure interested me, and she was struck dumb when I won the match.
 
She now took a second look at me, I felt. In some way, I had somewhat grown in height and she now looked on me as an equal. And as a possible friend.
 
She needed a friend. She said that her husband, with his soft-spoken style and self-effacing demeanor, had become quickly popular in India, but she hadn’t a person to talk to. Frankly, she said, she disliked spicy Indian food, impenetrable Indian languages, messy Indian clothes, noisy Indian cities and the smelly Indians she had so far encountered. They seemed shifty and unreliable to her. I somehow appeared to her somewhat different. She detested almost everything in India, and I guess she needed to find something to like in Kolkata. I was that person. We became friends.

​In the ensuing months she called me often. She needed my help to understand other people, doctors or servants, to explain her intent to other people, dress or furniture makers, to guide her about mangoes and markets, taxis and textiles. I met and liked her husband, Desmond, and saw immediately why he would be easily adaptable to Indian people and their ways. For Edna, Kolkata, in fact anything Indian, remained an enduring and execrable enigma. None of my interpretations or explanations worked. She loathed it all.
 
Our friendship ended when my parents moved out to another home in a different part of the city.
 
Thirty years later, I was working in the World Bank in the US and talking to a New Yorker colleague who had been in India. He mentioned Desmond, saying that he had died and his wife had settled in a town near Washington. He gave me Edna’s phone number.
 
When I called her Friday, Edna recognized me in a second and warmly insisted that we talk face to face. She suggested that I come over to her place after office, stay the night and return the following morning. She said she would get me the pajamas and a toothbrush. Such insistence was not customary in the US, but it sounded affectionate and well-meant and I agreed.
 
I took the hour-long bus trip and, as we approached the bus terminal, wondered how I would identify her after all these years. But I was the only non-white person in the bus in formal clothes, and Edna came forward in a second and hugged me.
 
When we arrived in her place, I had a shock. It could have been an Indian home. Every piece of furniture, every artifact, even every curtain or cushion was Indian. The rug on the floor was Indian, so were the framed pictures on the wall, of the Red Fort and Dal Lake and an antique colonial-era map of India.
 
She served me Makaibari tea with some pakoras, and, when I offered to take her out for dinner, countermanded it promptly by saying that she has already cooked Basmati rice and chicken butter-masala for me.
 
I was speechless for minutes. When I recovered my tongue, I made bold to ask her what had happened to change her view, since, the last I knew, she detested much of India – “with passion,” she added. What she then told me was a remarkable story.
 
It was not literature, philosophy or culture that turned her mind around. It was simply the ordinary people of India, the street folk and bazar vendors and domestic employees who altered her perspective.
 
“I began with endless distrust,” said Edna, “I assumed they were out to cheat me and take advantage of a naïve foreigner. Day by day the exact opposite happened. I would buy bananas, and the poor vendor would choose the best for me, return the excessive amount I had paid. The cleaner would find and give me the cash I had carelessly dropped in the kitchen. The cook gave me and my husband the best pieces of meat, to keep only the bones for himself. Day by day, they taught me a lesson I couldn’t overlook.
 
“Every time I went out, a fruit seller would pester me to buy his stuff. I refused, for I wanted to buy from the market next door where I would have more choice. One day, out on the street, the heel of my shoe came off. I didn’t know how to walk back home. The fruit seller came running, made me sit on his empty fruit basket, left with the broken shoe and came back in ten minutes with it repaired, put it on my foot and would not take a cent. I insisted, he refused. I doubt anybody would have done that for me in New York.”
 
Edna smiled, “Yes, I hated India with passion. And India took revenge. It just made me into an Indian.”

I took the trouble to learn a few languages and it has its advantages. I feel perfectly at home in Marseilles or Mexico City; I can walk around in complete abandon, knowing that if I get lost I can count on easy guidance from passersby or shopkeepers. But it has a few disadvantages too.
 
The English language is like a shark. It keeps gobbling up words and phrases from other
languages. Some of the most common and popular words in English are taken from foreign languages. For instance, the last sentence had five words from other languages.
 
When I learned French, I was amazed how many French words and expressions English had absorbed. Writing English, one may not even realize that phrases like avant-garde, carte blanche, crème de la crème, hors d’oeuvre, cul de sac, déjà vu and faux pas are French and may skip the accent marks. As for individual words, they are so many and so common that to identify them as French will invite incredulity – mirage, encore, matinee souvenir façade, cliche and fiancée, for example. Were I to pronounce two fairly familiar words ‘denouement’ and ‘penchant’ correctly, as they are spoken in France, nobody in the US or UK will even understand me. That is the hitch of learning a foreign language.

​I was just as surprised when I went to work in the Middle East. I found that ordinary discourse in English would be impossible without the help of Arabic words that have sidled their way into the language. I cannot drink alcohol or coffee (let alone add sugar to it), eat an orange or candy, sit on a sofa or mattress, wear cotton, let alone do algebra, read a magazine or go on a safari – absolutely zero. All those words rolled off Arab lips, even zero.
 
I am not even sure that Indians realize the plethora of words from the subcontinent that are now part of the English vocabulary. In making the transition, the words have no doubt sometimes changed their meaning to an extent. ‘Bandana’ has come to mean a large kerchief used as a headgear or sweatband instead of a tying fabric; ‘cashmere’ a kind of classy fabric instead of a place whence it comes; ‘cushy’ something comfortable instead of a happy person; ‘jodhpur’ close-fitting trousers instead of a city; ‘loot’ a collection of valuables instead of a stolen collection; ‘mantra’ a watchword instead of a religious text; ‘mogul’ a powerful person instead of a dynastic ruler; and ‘thug’ a hoodlum instead of a ‘cheat.’

​Certain other Hindi words however have retained their original meaning quite well in English. ‘Bangles’ are still the delicate ornaments women wear; ‘chutney’ is still a delectable condiment; ‘dinghy’ is still a heavy boat; ‘guru’ is still a mentor or instructional leader; ‘jungle’ is still a forest, though often used metaphorically; ‘pundit’ is a knowledgeable person as before; ‘pajamas’ are still the loose garment you wear; and a ‘typhoon’ remains a fearsome stormy weather.
 
I have referred to English as a shark that takes in large bites of other languages. But specialists are now noticing a new phenomenon: the shark is now chewing into other languages and changing them. Many English words are steadily entering other languages. Especially words that relate to science, business and technology. I see that clearly in the case of my mother tongue, Bengali.
 
If English words enter the Bengali language and literature, is it a good thing or a bad thing? The simple answer is a complex one. It is both a good and a bad thing.
 
Surely, a living language is, like all living entities, a changing thing. That is normal and good. As new things are invented and used, we need new words for them; as new ideas evolve, we again need new words to give them shape. If other countries have developed and named them, we might take them – just as the English speakers took our ‘bangles.’ In turn, we took words like a ‘table’ and ‘chair’ and made them parts of the Bengali vocabulary. The vocabulary grew; the Bengalis had, to their benefit, a larger universe of discourse. That is good.
 
What is not so good is the indolence that lets people shirk the important work of coining new words and phrases for new objects and ideas that are simple, practical, euphonious and appropriate to the receiving group. The use of software and mobile phones is now nearly universal, and yet there are no universally accepted equivalents that people can use. Both the institutions tasked to create equivalents and media leaders have failed the Bengali public. What we see now is the pathetic spectacle of people speaking an ugly hybrid language, even writing it, without compunction.
 
The shame of not knowing either language well enough, to be able to speak in one without a large dose of the other, seems to be dissolving. People who speak this mongrel  monstrosity might like to consider the perilous possibility that those who cannot but speak clumsily soon start to think clumsily. We all need a language to dream in and think in.

To none of my American neighbors the phrase ‘lighting a lamp’ means a thing. They flick a switch, and the light comes on. My daughter has gone a step further. She enters her home and says, “Lights,” and all the lights come on. If she wants to be particular, she says, “Living room lights” to make only the lights in her living room come on. Neither my neighbors nor my daughter will ever understand what the word ‘light’ signifies for me.
 
They do not understand because they have seldom encountered darkness. They move about in daylight, and the moment it gets dark they just turn their wrist to flood their home with light. If they are outside, they will find the streets awash with street lamps, their way lit by the light in every store, boutique, restaurant, salon and house. If they have blown a fuse at home or encountered a power outage in their town, it would have been a short-lived affair, too ephemeral and inconvenient to merit a single moment’s thought. For them, the long-life, high-strength, low-energy LED lights have now unleashed a torrent of light and more light.
 
It wasn’t always so. I have lived, like many of my contemporaries, for months in homes or towns where there was no electricity and darkness an ever-present reality in the evening. There were kerosene lamps and lanterns to be sure, but few families could afford one for each room. The lamps were essentially stationary, with a long glass chimney that had a narrow neck to allow a right draft for combustion; the portable lanterns you took if you had to go to the bathroom or kitchen. I was told some Baghdad Iranian had invented the original model and a Polish pharmacist had improved it. It used foul-smelling kerosene oil, a replacement for the whale oil used earlier, and gave no more than five to ten wattage of light, lending even a modest room an eerie glow.
 
Only a person with a steel resolve and eagle eyes could read in that penumbral light; my myopic eyes quickly gave up. There was no television those days, the radio would not work, the sole source of entertainment was conversation. People talked, urged by boredom, encouraged by nightly silence and prompted by the twin motives of curiosity and caring. Since I was known for my diligent reading during the day, my cousins urged me to tell stories. That is when I discovered my hidden talents for inventing and fibbing. I would name a famous author and even take a cue from his or her story, but then add ghastly elements that seemed appropriate to the dark scene. Every story had murder and mayhem: secret assassins, beheaded bodies, haunted females and dark, dank, dangerous mansions. I developed devoted listeners and a partly undeserved reputation as a raconteur. What I actually demonstrated was the skill to exploit the present ambiance. As the movie makers well know, nothing can be a better scene setter than a dark, ghoulish background.
 
When my mother took me to a humongous wedding, where the daughter of our rich neighbor, a spice merchant, was being married to the son of another rich man, a coal merchant (because, said my nosey cousin and the bride’s friend, he had already got her pregnant), I saw for the first time, the remarkable device of a pressurized kerosene lamp with a gas mantle, a Petromax. One uses a hand-pump to pressurize air which forces liquid fuel from a reservoir into a gas chamber; whose vapor then burns, heating the mantle to glow and give light. And – what light! – twenty times that of the lamps I had seen so far.
 
While I saw some advantages of not having electricity, the main one being that people talked to one another and considered it reasonably amusing, I might have thought the blessings of electric lights far outweighed all other benefits. But a month later I was on a train to central India, a small town where lived my two aunts with my grandmother.

​If November was strikingly cool in that dry, dusty town of Seoni, there was warmth in the enthusiasm the townspeople seemed to feel for the hoary Indian rite, the Festival of Lights. While in the big cities it is often turned into a rite of raucousness or a ritual of revelry, in this small town it was still, ceremonially and certainly, focused on lights. Every house on our street went about preparing for lights, hundreds of lights. Not light bulbs, not colored lights, nothing as egregious as that.
 
My aunts bought from the local stores dozens of clay pots. My grandmother helped them wash and clean them. I wrested the right to fill the pots with oil, not fuel oil, but fragrant mustard oil. Grandmother poured the oil each time from a large can into a small beaker and I used the beaker to fill the clay pots three-fourths with oil, one by careful one. The aunts then set a wick the length of the pot. Then we all went forth placing the oil-filled clay pots on every window sill, door frame, balcony and balustrade.
 
As the sun set, we took turns and lit the wicks each with a lighted candle. Suddenly, miraculously, fragrantly, each of the tiny clay pots sprang into life as a delicate beacon of light. I looked across the street and sideways. Every home had similar lights, tiny oil lamps, the kind our forefathers had lit centuries earlier, gently dispelling the oncoming gloom. No drums, no fireworks, no sound at all. Just a mild breeze occasionally toying with the tiny flames in every window, in every home. I turned to my grandmother and aunts in that velvet radiance and saw the three most beautiful women in the world. We were in the festival of light and life and joy.

​I wish I could capture and convey my hurts. The hurts especially of my childhood and youth when I was the most vulnerable, when I didn’t have resources to lessen my hurt. When people hurt me because they knew I couldn’t do anything about it. It is amazing what people do when they know they have the power to hurt, as when they step, without compunction, on an ant winding its way to its nest.
 
I was five when we lived briefly in Bhagalpur, next door to my mother’s cousin and her large family. The cousin was amiable and I was often in their home, playing with her large brood. On an occasion the tie-string to my pajama came loose and, seeing me struggling to retie it, the woman said, “Come here, my child, let me do it for you.” I went to her in full trust. She untied the string completely and then, before retying it, pulled my pajama down, exposing me naked to a roomful of kids. Her intention was quite clear, for she guffawed as she did it, and so did a whole chorus of her children and their friends. I wanted to die of shame. Ignoring their plea to stay and play, I went home. I mentioned the episode to nobody, but I never went anywhere near that home again.
 
A second’s merriment, a roomful of laughter. But no one knew the deep scar it left on my psyche. So deep and enduring that, decades later, I can recall it as if it happened yesterday.
 
Twenty years later, I had gone to Mumbai for some office project and was struck by a serious case of food poisoning. For three days I lay in a hospital bed and was advised another two days of rest when the first acute spell was over. Homesick, I took the rash decision to fly back home to Kolkata. Weak, nearly tottering, I somehow made the flight, arrived in the airport and stood near the carousel on uncertain legs waiting for my suitcase. Suddenly, a tall, burly middle-aged man, dressed in a three-piece suit, the style then for senior executives, brusquely pushed me aside to approach the carousel. I nearly fell, but I managed to mutter, “Why are you pushing me?” The man looked at me with contempt, the way I presume he looks daily at his subordinates, then said peremptorily, “Shut up!” and went forward. I was too ill and weak and too stunned to say anything at all.
 
Years have passed and I am a little surprised that I remember it so well. The reason perhaps is that the rudeness was so outrageous and shameless for a man clearly in a position to know better. This too was a person who knew he could hurt another man without any consequence for him.

​It is an interesting question why people behave in a way clearly designed to hurt other people. In the second incident, it was clear to me that the presumed executive took one look at a disheveled young person, me, and decided that I was a nobody who could be pushed aside with impunity. He had possibly done it to dozens of hapless people earlier and faced no consequence. In fact, he may have enjoyed the exercise of his power, the more relishing because it was illegitimate, and savored the satisfaction of having gotten away with the act. He was like a thief who gloats over his triumph after having stolen pennies from a blind beggar’s collection box and continues to pilfer with a sense of accomplishment.
 
I have since met many executives, businessmen and bureaucrats who consider what they do so important – and, in consequence, consider themselves so important – that they feel they can arrogate the right to break the social rules that ordinary people follow. They feel entitled to break into a queue where others have been waiting patiently for hours or to circumvent traffic rules by tipping an impecunious traffic cop. Donald Trump expressed the attitude well when he said he was smart enough to cheat on taxes which others were foolish enough to pay. Such people are not only invincibly convinced that they are very valuable people, they are also, if only implicitly, equally convinced that many others are of no value and can be fairly pushed aside.
 
But it is the first incident which is perhaps even more interesting. Why did an educated middle-class woman expose a young child in front of several people, including his friends and playmates, and make the display of his nakedness a matter of amusement? What made her think of a child’s helpless shame as a joke to regale the young and old?
 
It is an exquisitely perfect example of human evil, where people find an occasion for laughter in human suffering. To me it seems almost more repulsive than Nazi surgeons performing medical torture on Jewish girls or Saudi pilots bombing Yemeni children in schools and hospitals. The surgeons and bombers were doing terrible things, but did it with gritted teeth; they were not laughing at the same time. Scott Peck writes of real evil in the human heart and uses the Biblical expression “people of the lie” to designate the perpetrators. How else to understand men who amuse themselves by burning cats and setting dogs to tear open other dogs?
 
I fear not just for the helpless child and feeble youth, but for the hundreds of the vulnerables, the poor, the sick, the unemployed, the easily displaced and exploited, who remain at the mercy of the evil protagonists among us.