​I started my career working in a factory. I followed a shift, clocking in, working eight hours on a machine and producing my quota. I didn’t like it then, but I realized later I learned a precious lesson. I learned how many people earn their keep, doing what they dislike, hating the people they work for, cursing the system that reduces them to cogs in a machine.

I know now that the lesson applies to many places beyond a factory. I flaunted elegant suits and ties in many offices, but the appearance belied the brutal work pace. Thanks to tech wizardry that can now monitor every employee’s every second, the pace in many places is today breathless and ruthless. If you work in those impressive looking offices, you better keep running all the time, or someone will soon run you out the door. Your mobile is their leash, and, like a pet, you can’t ever ignore its call – or the command Big Brother gives you. If you get a free breakfast, the idea is to lure you to your desk earlier, and if you get free coffee, it is to keep you awake at your yoke longer.
 
I was recently in major hospitals for five surgeries. Hospitals are big business these days that bring in big money. They run exactly like factories, where patients are processed like raw material, added medicines and subtracted malignancies, and quickly turned out at a handsome price. Surgical patients, for instance, don’t rest in rooms; marketable products, they are shunted from pre-op to post-op. Their ease and comfort are no concern; the doctors’ convenience is the priority. If you are late for an appointment, you are fined. If the doctor sees you after an hour, you count your blessing that he is not seeing you after two.
 
I have taught at a dozen universities and nothing distinguishes them from factories except their phony pretension that they are ennobling young minds. They are really in the business of selling, increasingly at higher prices, certificates that their students can use to get jobs. Thousands pass through their portals, much as boxes do through Amazon’s giant warehouses, and quickly forget what they acquired in their classes – though they cannot forget the debts they still have to pay. So dubious is the quality of the ‘processing’ students get that employers are getting leery. Google, where everybody wants to work, for instance, is reportedly considering totally ignoring educational certificates in hiring new interns.
 
I have limited direct knowledge of the media, but friends tell me they too operate factory-like these days, caring little for quality or human consideration, ruled pitilessly by the bean counters that insist on a sweat shop turning out the highest output at the lowest cost. So, one must be grateful for the dedicated journalist, author, composer or filmmaker who pursues a dream nevertheless at some cost and refuses to cow to the blockbuster mentality. I talk to actors in New York who seek opportunities on the stage or screen and hear horror stories how they are treated, often mistreated, when they are recruited, deployed or dismissed. Harvey Weinstein may be a colossal cad, but he is the template of a legion predators in the movie world.
 
The field of politics is of course the Wild West and it is no surprise that political parties have an increasing number of leaders with charges against them of intimidation, rape and armed assault. Studies show it is an upward trend, for it suits the criminals to have the protective garb of a legislator and it suits the parties to have candidates who pay their own way, doubtless with illicit cash. This too is an example of the input-output calculus of a factory: you input quantities of graft money to make larger quantities of unaccounted money, which too can be used to generate illicit cash galore. Some politicos wear as a badge of pride their astonishing facility in misusing and mistreating the foot soldiers who work for them.
 
The harsh, inhumane factory life I saw at the start of my career appears now to have infected the culture of many other walks of life. It is a culture of exploiting people, using them as subhuman tools for personal or organizational ends, often for money and more often for power. When wealth accumulates and men decay, Goldsmith warned us, the land not only fares ill it becomes a prey to “hastening ills,” a prelude to disaster.
 
Our offices, hospitals, universities and media don’t have to run like this, in a dehumanized fashion, caring little for human suffering or satisfaction. We can do better. Even our factories don’t have to be inhuman.
 
With all our experience and ingenuity, we can devise workplaces that are humane and match the human spirit. We don’t have to make things and offer services in a way that makes of human beings beasts of bondage and creatures of captivity. You don’t have to be alt-left to see the wisdom of Marx’s telling phrase ‘wage slaves.’ We should be able to run our life and society without shameful slavery.

She had a convertible and she drove fast. Her silver-blue car would streak through my neighborhood and raise eyebrows. She couldn’t care less.
 
She braked audibly in front of my doorstep and rang the bell insistently.
 
“It is a glorious day. Why are you wasting it indoors?” she demanded.
 
It was no use saying I had bills to pay and my accountant’s exigent letter to answer. She barely listened and then responded with an impatient shake of her long, unruly mien.
 
“You do that later. Now, you come with me.”
 
She hardly gave me the time to put on my shoes. As I tied the shoestrings, she brushed her hair and answered mail on her phone, both at the same time.

It was indeed a bright day. Diane whizzed past the city streets and headed toward Frederic in the north. Passing a shopping mall, she stopped and said, “I’ll pick up a couple of lemonades. We may get thirsty on the way.”
 
As she stopped, I noticed a liquor store next door. “I finished my bottle of Campari last night,” I said. “Why not I pick up a bottle why you buy the lemonade?”
 
It was a large store, and they had a few items on sale. A bottle of Absolut vodka caught my eye and I took it too. As I placed the bottles on the counter, the salesman said, “Sir, we have some gin too on heavy discount.” I nodded and paid.
 
A few miles ahead we were past the city traffic and Diane pressed on the pedal. The cool breeze hit my face. It was agreeable to be out of the city and its noise and grime. Life seemed very pleasant and peaceful.
 
Just then we both heard the siren, the police signal. A police car was following us with flashing lights. Disgusted, Diane muttered, “What’s this? I certainly wasn’t speeding.”
 
She stopped the car. The police car stopped right behind us. The cop took his time checking our number on his computer before he came to ask for our driving license.
 
More checking and then he came to the window with the strange message, “There is the report of a stolen vehicle.”
 
Aghast, Diane replied, “I have had this car for three years. It has never been stolen.”
 
The cop looked at me and asked, “Who is that man?”
 
“My friend. He has nothing to do with my car.”
 
The cop went back to his car for more checking. Then he returned, a little abashed, and said, “I am sorry. There was a mistake about the number of the vehicle. Apologies for stopping you.”
 
Hardly had he spoken when he noticed the bottles that had rolled out of the paper bag on the back seat.
 
“Do you realize that it is against the law to transport liquor bottles from one state to another?”
 
I spoke up, “I am not transporting anything across state lines. I saw some liquor being sold at discount and bought them for my own use. They are going home with me when we return from our trip.”
 
The cop looked askance and examined the paper bag gingerly. He realized there were only three bottles, hardly the stuff for a major commercial transaction. He let us go.
 
The last word was of course Diane’s. When the cop left and the car started again, Diane heaved a noticeable sigh and asked, “Did you really have to buy so many bottles?”
 
I maintained a discreet silence.
 
We had a pleasant time in Frederick. We went to a small museum and then we had an excellent lunch in a cozy pint-sized family-run restaurant.

​Diane drove us back uneventfully to my home. We were both tired and I made a cocktail for us to revive our spirit.
 
She took a look at her glass and asked suspiciously, “What is this stuff?”
 
I replied, “It is called a Poor Man’s Vodka Martini. It has only ginger ale and vodka – the vodka that we took across state lines but, unwisely, did not sell for profit but brought back for our own delectation.”

Ajit died four weeks ago.
 
Amar, a common friend, wrote last week to say that Ajit had succumbed to the insidious cancer that was preying on his lungs.
 
Ajit belonged to the generation that did not own a computer or was not comfortable with it. That made regular contact from abroad awkward. The last time I called him, he could barely talk. I surmised then that his condition had deteriorated. He said, “My days are numbered.” The curtain came down shortly after that.
 
Ajit was always slight, recently slighter. With the advantage of a suave voice, he spoke clearly but gently. There was often a touch of humor in his choice of words. If unaccustomed, you might think he was mocking you, but it was his oblique way of kidding you. You knew it from his radiant smile. He was a friend and he let us feel the warmth of his friendship.

​We were in school together. We were just kids. As with Amar, we bonded together in utter candor, in a way we adults don’t seem to be able now. We had nothing to gain or lose; we just wanted to be with each other and bask in the pleasure of camaraderie. We enjoyed talking, joking, laughing, commiserating with each other. We supported and sustained each other, without knowing that we were doing so.
 
That memory endured even as we separated after school and went in different directions. As we aged, we acquired experience and wrinkles. We added lines to our face, but that was perhaps just a mask we sported. Probably we didn’t change all that much. Our boyhood links remained important to us. Were I in town on rare occasions, we would try to get together.
 
Mukul was the great organizer among us. He would invite us to his home or his club and we would gather and share stories. He had a large heart and a raucous laughter. He would initiate a story about our school days, a temperamental teacher or a classmate’s contretemps, and we would join in with our own weird and wonderful recollections. Those didn’t have to be the best days of our life, but they were certainly memorable.
More, those were our precious links. Our lives might be distinct, even our lifestyles might be very different, but we had a treasure house of memories in common, a bond of ineffable affection that bound us together.
 
What did this pool of memory mean to us?
 
Mukul once said to me, “I run a business where seldom things go the way I want them to go. Even in my family life unexpected things happen. These aren’t always pleasant. But those days, when we reveled in one another’s company, were golden. Not because they were perfect, but because I remember the perfect parts. Friends were those parts.”
 
He touched a chord in my heart. I go around the world in my work and in my search for what I am not sure of. I encounter fun and fury, hurt and happiness. I make and break relations. I find strange, unexpected things and maybe I find a little of myself. I realize more and more that I don’t realize much. I am just a wayward schoolboy in quest of something that I am not sure of.
 
But whatever I do and wherever I am, I need a helping hand. A word of support and a gesture of affection. I need to know someone somewhere cares a little for me. Someone gives a damn whether I live or die.
 
Our small circle of friends in school, now steadily getting smaller, was a charmed circle. The nexus was the purest gold of friendship. We just liked to be with the others. That experience sustained us then. The memory of it sustains us still.
 
Last year Mukul was to visit me in Washington. I did a spring-cleaning of my messy home in anticipation. He never came: his pancreas gave way just two weeks before the day of his flight.
 
And, now, Ajit too is gone. Leaving a trail of unspoken words and unshared thoughts.
 
I know my days are numbered too. I live in exile, dreaming of the day I will walk again on the streets of my childhood town, in heat and grime, breathing unaccustomed air, bleary eyed and baffled at the changed landscape, looking at strangers’ faces and thinking of the friends I have known and lost.
 
And cherishing the ones that remain. 

Birubabu was the gatekeeper in my school. He was a middle-aged thin-bone person, with a lean face adorned with the faint suggestion of a moustache. He lived in a tiny room of the headmaster’s cottage next to the school. I don’t know why he was called the gatekeeper, for opening the school gates in the morning and closing them at night seemed the least of his chores. He was really the headmaster’s gofer, running all kinds of errands, from bringing in a new blackboard to taking money – the school’s meager earnings – to the bank. Gatekeeper still was his official title, allowing the headmaster no doubt to retain him at the lowest wage.
 
You could infer the latter from his perpetually soiled shirt and tattered trousers. We of course paid him no notice, had no reason to. He did not make an appealing sight and insignificance was writ large on his face. Through a corner of the eye I had periodically seen him clean a corridor or bring in a supply of chalk to our class.
 
It changed the day I was not feeling well, and the teacher allowed me to go home. Somebody called my father, who was to come and fetch me. While I waited, feeling sick, in the scorching midday sun, Birubabu appeared from nowhere.
 
“You don’t look well,” he said, “you shouldn’t stand in the sun.”
 
“I am waiting for my father. He will come and get me.”
 
“You better wait in the shade. I will tell your father when he comes.” He added, “Come with me.”
 
He escorted me to what I later learned was his room. He poured a glass of water for me and then left to look out for my father.
 
It was a minuscule room, perhaps once used as a storage area. There was a cot, a small cupboard and a modest desk with a frayed rattan chair where I sat. Little else.
 
Very incongruously, right next to the bed was a cheap but rather large bookshelf. It was packed with books. I wasn’t feeling well at all, but my curiosity overcame my indisposition.

​My first glance told me that the books were all old and shopworn, doubtless all used and discarded ones. The second and closer glance surprised me. They were almost all books of poetry. Most were Bengali poets, old and young; a few were in English, including a two-volume anthology of European poetry. A school gatekeeper and poetry!
 
I was greatly astonished. Though I was a bookworm I seldom touched a book of poems. It seemed less connected to life than the stories and novels I read, something airy-fairy, and I avoided it. Now I had to reason to rethink.
 
I was in bed the next three days, but I could not get the gatekeeper’s collection of poetry out of my mind. I mentioned it to both my father and mother, and they said something I still remember: it is unwise to judge people by how they look or what they do.
 
My curiosity remained and Birubabu seemed a man of mystery. The following week I went up to him at the school gates to thank him for his kindness. Hesitantly, I broached the subject of his book collection. He paused for a moment, then said very simply, “Poems help me.”
 
We moved homes the following year and I went to a different school. I had new friends and new interests. Tentatively, I began to read poetry. Modern poetry, which at first seemed obscure and bizarre, started to make sense. I realized one understands nothing of a language unless one immerses in its poetry. Some poets became icons of my life.
 
Five years later I went back to my old school, which now had a new young headmaster. The school no longer had a gatekeeper, he told me. The groundskeeper opened the school gates in the morning and closed them in the evening.
 
When I mentioned Birubabu, the headmaster narrated an unexpected account. Birendra Sanyal was earlier a teacher in a private school in another state. When he came to Kolkata, he didn’t find a job and was forced to take a job as a gatekeeper. He left after three years without leaving a forwarding address. The headmaster had heard the rumor that he now works for a newspaper in another town and writes poetry under a pseudonym.
 
What was not a rumor was the fact that I was the eighth alumnus who had come to him to ask about Birubabu. All had a special memory of the man and an act of kindness to report. All remembered the scruffy thin-boned soiled-shirt man with fondness and gratitude.
 
An act of kindness? Sure. But I had a larger debt to own: the immense, immemorial, inscrutable beauty of poetry. Poems help me too.

I remember how it irritated me to receive missives from my old aunt saying, “Don’t you ever think of me? Why don’t you write me?”
 
I had arrived in Washington on a bright summer day. Essentially as a pauper, for the rules then meant I couldn’t convert my savings into dollars. I had left a well-paid job, a company gifted car and a luxury apartment I owned.
 
In steady sequence I found a job, first with a big company and then with a UN group, and bought a home in the suburb and then in the city. It did not come easy. Long hours, demanding work, learning fast on my feet. And making do with less sleep. It is tough being a migrant in a vastly different land.
 
And then to receive a plaint that I wasn’t writing enough letters! How thoughtless!
 
Now I know I did not understand.

​I was a fool to misread her message. She wasn’t saying that I did not write enough letters. She was saying she loved me. She was saying she missed me. She wanted to hear from me because she cared a lot for me. It wasn’t a complaint. It was a declaration of love.

​It makes me ashamed to think that what should have made me weep with joy only annoyed me. I was too preoccupied with my work, my new life, my quotidian cares to decipher a loving message.
 
It horrifies me to think of how often heartfelt messages like this are misread. We are all different people, with different ways of expressing ourselves. We are men and women, with backgrounds of many kinds and understanding at many levels. Simple words are misunderstood, words of concern cause unintended hurt.

Now that I live far away from my friends and relations, we connect through mail and talk. Do my brothers know how much I love them? Do my nephews and nieces, some very talented, realize how much I miss them? Do friends and readers who write to me, often very supportively, know how much I prize them? For a wordsmith, I feel inept in the tangled web of messages and fear I am doing a poor job. Those links are golden for a man in exile.
 
Even those who are near us, the people we see and talk to more easily, are often mysteriously difficult to connect with. My friends tell me how hard it is often to understand their children. They seem distant, their preferences seem incomprehensible.
 
My friend Deben says, “What I see as a gesture of help, my children see as a move of intrusion. What is meant as a word of friendly counsel, is heard as gratuitous and unwelcome advice.”
 
His wife Neera added, “When I buy things for them, those lie unused in their storage. Any suggestion I make about their home, their work or their children, is rebuffed. They seem to speak the same language, but not really.”
 
I have two loving and thoughtful daughters. They live in a faraway city but take pains to call and check on their strange father who seems to put a lot of value on books and papers, ideas and research, and disappears periodically in other lands. When I sit and eat alone, I remember the time Lina asked me to return home early and served me an artfully grilled salmon. I remember too when Monica invited to the small apartment she had as a student and served me poached eggs for breakfast. As I shave, I think of the time, further down, Monica asked me why she can’t shave. As I shower, I recall Lina’s curiosity about using the bathtub instead. My mind even races back to the days they ran about our home as toddlers, drew pictures and scribbled on walls with crayons.
 
They are grown up now, young women whose life has been quite different from their dad’s. I remind myself that they are apt to think differently and value different things. It is a pleasure still to find we have a few things in common to admire or to detest. I am not sure we understand each other fully each time. Nor are they. But I am relieved and happy that we talk and find a couple of things to agree on. I believe they know that I love them, but of course, like all children, they will never grasp the full extent what they mean to me. They may not even believe, were I to tell them, that my life would have been rather desolate without their magnetic presence.
 
I hope I am learning. I am trying to avoid the mistake I made with my aunt. Nothing that I ever did was more important than her affection. Little that I ever achieved was worthier than the love that anyone ever, undeservedly, bestowed on me.
 
Too late and too little, I miss my irritating aunt.

​On my seventh birthday, I received a memorable gift. It made me very proud and utterly happy. I carried it everywhere with me. I showed it to all my friends. I used it every day and loved its feel. I call it memorable, for its memory is still vivid in my mind. Yet I can barely talk about it, for few will understand my ecstasy over a thing that the world now seems to regard as a quaint old thing whose time has passed.
 
I am talking of a fountain pen. A fountain pen! Many have no idea what it is. But it was a major innovation in its time. The legend is that a tenth-century Egyptian Caliph, tired of a dipping pen, ordered his men to devise something that did not soil his hands or clothes with ink. The fountain pen was born.

It was an ingenious idea. You did not dip it in ink, for it had an internal reservoir of liquid ink, which dripped through a nib thanks to gravity and capillary action. For seven long years I had contended with pencils, with hard lead and fragile wood. And, now, on the glorious morning of my seventh birthday, father and mother were presenting me with a red box wrapped in blue-and-yellow tissue, wherein nested a shiny navy fountain pen.
 
When filled with royal blue ink, of which my parents had generously bought an ample bottle, it wrote. And how! It wrote blithely, smoothly, copiously, for I kept wielding the instrument with untiring enthusiasm. I wrote snatches of poems I knew; I wrote smart aphorisms I had read; I wrote my name endless times. I had a precocious interest in fonts, and I thrilled to the egotistic artistry of writing my name in a thousand unusual ways.
 
It was a delight to hold its slick body in my fingers and an unspeakable pleasure to let it roll on paper. No longer the harsh scratch of a pencil on cheap paper, but the glissando movement of a magnificent tool across a sheet in ceaseless, soundless abandon. I did not share the venerable Caliph’s distaste for soiled fingers. I cared little when ink splattered my fingers as I used a clumsy dropper to fill the pen’s slender body with dark ink. We didn’t have soft-lead pencils earlier, so the contrasted bright lettering of a fountain pen was a joy to behold.
 
The truth was, despite my affection and tender care, the fragile plastic body of the pen cracked in a couple of years. Seeing my despair, a generous uncle bought me a new mottled-green pen. It was a second-generation pen, which did not need a dropper to fill it. It had a tube inside to hold the ink, and a clip outside that could be used to suck ink in the tube. Ramu, a rascal in my class, bought such a pen too and promptly developed the technique to squirt ink at the back of unwary classmates he resented for some obscure reason. Once caught, he was taken to the headmaster’s office and we never saw him again. Strangely, I missed Ramu’s perverse quirks.

​As in women, slenderness in pens has a charm for me, and twenty years have seen me adhere loyally to Cross pens, first ballpoint pens and then rollerball pens, especially when they have glossy lacquered finish. Apparently, I am not the only one who finds them charming. I have so far lost twenty-three of them. I would leave them on my unattended desk for ten minutes, even in well-heeled places like the World Bank or my Embassy den, and they would disappear in a jiffy.
 
Ballpoints have a point and rollerballs roll well, but frankly nothing can hold a candle to a fountain pen, if you care about writing. Pareshbabu, the soft-spoken septuagenarian who worked in Pen Hospital on Chowringhee and taught me all I know about pens, made me a world-class pen for thirty rupees: he spent the entire money on a superb nib and then fitted it on the body of an old pen. I still miss him and the pen.
 
I have affluent friends who swoon over Mont Blanc, but the costly pen I could crave is Faber-Castell’s 2015 Limited Edition pen that costs $5000. If I had money to burn, I would much rather go for the superb designs of the Italians, a Visconti or a Montegrappa.
 
Forget about luxe and design, a pen is for writing, and nothing writes better than a fountain pen. That is what Pareshbabu’s modest but matchless pen did for me. It inspired me to write. To fall in love with writing.
 
Last year, again on my birthday, Lina, who knows her father well, gave me the gift of a fountain pen. A somber, serious, get-to-work pen that my rebellious, playful heart cherishes.

I often get lost. Partly because I am absent minded. Partly because I am the opposite – present minded – and pay so much attention to what is around me that I overlook where I am going.
 
I am also good at losing things, books, pens, glasses, watches, phones and money. I haven’t yet lost my passport and ended up in detention. Curiously, I once got nearly detained for the opposite reason: I had too many passports – an Indian passport, for I was born in India, an American passport, for I lived in the US, an American diplomatic passport, for that was my status, and a blue UN passport, laissez-passer, for I worked for the World Bank.
 
The good thing about getting lost is that is that you are not really lost, you are with yourself, and end up, however late, in a hotel or in your home. The bad thing about losing things is that it can cause some inconvenience – at least the inconvenience of having to search for the missing thing. The worse is the irritation of not finding the missing thing at the end.
 
So, it was a pleasure, at the end of a modest but pleasant lunch in a museum café in Bochum, Germany, to hear my friends talk of their Lost and Found experience.
 
Ashis, my brother, narrated that, on his way back from Turkey, airport security asked him to remove the iPhone from his person and he quickly inserted it in the handbag on the conveyor belt. The handbag looked like his but was someone else’s. Returning home, he could not find his phone, checked his computer and found where the phone had ended up, in Bangalore.
 
He called the person, a government clerk, who was relieved to find that the unknown phone in his bag was not a terrorist’s explosive device. But he was irritated that he had to pay a large sum to mail it back to its owner. Ashis mailed him the money and a token amount as his reward. He felt the poor man merited some compensation for his hassle.
 
When Dorothy exited a tourist bus in Rome minus her backpack, her Italian friends said they were praying that she would recover the lost bag. Her German friends said lost valuables are seldom returned in Italy and suggested she forget about it. Dorothy went ahead and bought a new laptop, the most valuable thing lost in her backpack. When she fired up the laptop, the first message that popped up was a notice from the Italian police: she was required to recover within 24 hours a brown backpack including a laptop computer, which someone had found and deposited with the polizia nazionale.
 
Ulrik, a museum curator in Essen, had lost his wallet some years ago during a visit to East Germany. Despondent, he perked up when he received a call at home from a woman in Leipzig to say she had found the wallet. He returned to Leipzig, but the woman said she was sorry she no longer had the wallet. She had, as the rules required her to, handed the wallet over to the local police. Ulrik went to the police station, but the police didn’t have it either. According to rules, they had passed it to the East German Lost and Found section. Ulrik then rushed to the Lost and Found section, but, no, they didn’t have it either. They had it forwarded it to the West German police. Ulrik returned home frustrated, planning to pay a visit to the police the next day, to find the wallet, neatly ensconced in an envelope, hanging from his door knob. She called the East German woman the next day, to thank her and offered to send her some reward money. She refused any gift.
 
Jonathan then said that it was hard, nearly impossible, to lose anything in Japan. He had traveled in train from Osaka to Tokyo, and, after alighting, realized that he had left his briefcase in the train. He had no hope of retrieving the briefcase, but since it contained his passport he was obligated to report the loss to the railway police station. The conversation was not easy, for the police officer spoke scant English but he insisted that Jonathan see him the next day, precisely 3.47 pm.  Jonathan did not understand why and was particularly confused at the precise time specified, but he did turn up at the police station on time. The police officer rushed with him to the train platform, where the Osaka-Tokyo train approached, and the officer entered the compartment Jonathan indicated. They both saw the briefcase lying untouched exactly at the spot Jonathan had left it in his seat, though the train had shuttled between Osaka and Tokyo for three days.

​Losing may be disconcerting, often costly and discombobulating, but recovering a lost wallet, backpack or briefcase, against seemingly impossible odds, is certainly a great pleasure.
 
My mother, rather distraught, visited my father in the emergency ward of the largest hospital in Kolkata. When she returned I noticed, with the typical perceptiveness of a ten-year old, that her gold necklace, inherited from her grandmother, was missing. Maybe the clasp at the neck came undone as she walked. The precious necklace, we believed, was gone for good. The next day I accompanied my mother as she went to visit my father. As we were about to enter the hospital, we saw, on the street in front of the gates, where at least 50,000 people must have passed since my mother’s last visit, glinting in the bright afternoon sun my mother’s glittering 24-carat gold necklace.

My brother, Ashis, was to receive an international award and I made a quick hop from Iceland to arrive for the ceremony in Germany.
 
Bochum is one of the larger universities in northern Germany, located in a curious region that combines the pastoral with the industrial. That is where a major foundation had decided to honor him for his lifelong work on creativity and mass violence.
 
Many years ago, I had gone to Essen on the invitation of a mining company. I saw a highly industrialized area that bore the oversize footprint of the Krupp empire. Krupp was Europe’s largest company and for 400 years Germany’s main arms maker, producing tanks, ships, guns and cannons. Naturally, during the Second World War it became the top target of allied bombers. I saw huge destruction and massive reconstruction and came away with the impression of a mainly industrial Rhineland.
 
Now I was seeing the other side of the region, the softer, bucolic side.
 
An hour’s run from Dusseldorf, I was ensconced in a charming hotel. Away from the main road, and quite a few steps from a golf course, you walk up to a modern building that looks from afar a bit like a chalet. The view from my room consisted entirely of oak, fir and pine; I could go for a shower leaving my trousers on the bed.
 
A cool but bright day. I walked down the bluff where the hotel is located. A bricklayer and a mason, working on an annex of the hotel, sat sipping beer during lunch break. They politely took off their cap and waved. A young woman pushing a baby in a pram and crooning passed by and nodded.
 
I reached a side street and walked on. A caressing breeze, a long series of tall pines. A real pleasure to walk on the cleanest, smoothest sidewalk I have ever seen.
 
“Are you tired? Would you care to join us for dinner?” asked my host from the foundation.
 
I was tired after the briefest nap on the plane, but I was also hungry. I loved the salmon and salad, along with the suave Riesling.
​
A brief drizzle in the morning, a cooler air.
 
“Would you like to join us for a visit to an industrial museum?”
 
My past decided: I can’t skip a museum that has to do with mines, for I spent time in coal and metal mines in India. The museum was an ingenious one, housed in the gigantic coal washing plant that served the major factories of the area. The huge machines remain, and the three floors have been imaginatively converted into three linked exhibits: Memory, that depicts the ancient land; History, that tells the story of its industrialization; and Present, that offers a fascinating view of its fast-changing face from war production to peacetime industry.
 
I kept wondering if defunct factories in India, like the one I worked in, couldn’t be converted into a museum this fascinating.
 
The event in the evening was well attended. A large hall, many dignitaries and scholars, and a hearteningly large group of younger people. I do not endure long speeches well; the loss of time is seldom made up by a measurable gain of wisdom. There were three of them, telling us of the foundation, its purpose and activities, and the larger goals of the area’s universities. Then, somebody narrated my brother’s life work in the social sciences, his studies of creativity and mass violence.
 
Finally, came the climactic moment when Ashis received the Hans Kilian Award and started his talk on the 1947 killing of a million Indians and displacement of fourteen million more. It was a telling speech, but my mind wandered.

​I was thinking of the nine-year-old standing next to me at a third-floor window, while arsonists went about setting fire to our house. I was thinking of the boy walking with me to school and complaining that I walked too fast and missed the fun things on a Kolkata street. I was remembering an adolescent telling anecdotes to adoring, laughing friends in our favorite terrace. Eating in our aunt’s small kitchen and fancifully christening the egg casserole he liked. Hugging my disconsolate mother who missed his long absence in a faraway university. Telling me of his dreams to study scientists in a tiny Delhi apartment. His dramatic reappearance in my parents’ home with his simpering new bride. His happy, excited entry in a cherished research center. His long days and nights at work while I chatted and drank tea with his wife. Listening to Vilayet’s sitar together in his cozy but cold home in old Delhi. His endless writing and furious espousal of victims’ causes. The erupting hate of fanatics and our fear for his safety. His New Delhi home, the paintings on his walls that he loves, the torrential music that he adores, the overflowing books and research papers that fill every room. Our spirited walks on Delhi’s uneven streets. And our talk, unending talk, late at night, early morning, over tea, on rain-swept days and chilly nights.
 
Ashis finished, talking of the elderly Sikh who slit the throats of his daughters before they could be raped by invaders, and the thin ray of hope in the action of the gutsy few who tried to save the helpless many.
 
Time for the celebratory dinner and a joyous cocktail. Our last brief hour together. A plane waits to take him 4000 miles east. A very separate one flies me 4000 miles west into an alien sunset.

I am a champion of broken relations. I seem to simply wade through them.
 
When I look back, I see a long string of wrecked relationships. Yes, I have been lucky to have had splendid and happy relationships, but what seem to stand out are the many that ended, either with a bang or with a whimper.
 
Yet you would be wrong to think of me as exceptionally hard-hearted, for I cannot recall an instance when I ended a relationship. Either someone else did, or the relationship died on the vine. The question of who ended a relationship is usually a red herring. Often one backs out of it in the uneasy realization that it has lost its joie de vivre, even if the other hasn’t yet woken up to the reality.
 
The sad reality is that most relationships, just like most friendships, run of out of steam in a while. It is just a question of time. It is a cruel thing to say. Many will protest, recalling the time a friend or a lover abandoned them, and they angrily attributed it to an ignominious reason. Often the anger, coupled with humiliation, prevents them seeing that the link had, much earlier, begun to lose its shine.

​Why does that happen? For the simple reason that we change and grow, sadly but inevitably, in very different directions. A continuing relationship is a huge challenge. Two of us have to build bridges even while we move, like two independent rivers, over the uneven terrain of our lives and careers, dreams and ambitions. The moment we finish building a bridge, we find the rivers have changed courses, and there looms the arduous work of building another. Somebody said, in a melancholy martial metaphor, that the battlefield of love is never quiet: the moment you think the war is won, you have lost – unless you are ready to start all over again.
 
Others will recall relationships that have lasted a lifetime. Alas, length and apparent durability often mean very little. We well know that people outside of a relationship can really know nothing of its quality. Relationships that we see at close distance, like our parents and close relations and friends, might give the illusion that we are sure of their quality or even of their sincerity. Such impressions are particularly misleading, for we have an emotional stake in believing those relationships were ideal, if not perfect.
 
It is a sad but safe guess that only a small number of relations are fully satisfying and continue to be so. Their continuity proves little. People continue in a relation for a vast variety of reasons, some exalted, some less so. Some continue from a sense of loyalty. A woman may not leave her lover because he is suddenly disabled; a husband decides not to abandon his grievously ill wife. Some continue in a dismal, even abusive, relationship because of religious or family reasons. Others stay on for their young children. A vast number continue in relationships that mean little to them simply because the alternative is inconvenient, impractical, fearsome or simply economically impossible. After persisting in a liaison for twenty years where does a middle-aged woman, without an attractive career or independent resources, go, especially if she has children? An aging man would rather adhere to his cozy habits than set out on a quest for a more meaningful relationship.
 
These are not reasons for frivolously ending a relationship, but to take note that relations do sunder, often, for good reason. When they do, it causes immeasurable pain. I know it well. It is an agony that nothing extinguishes, and few things extenuate. Even if I were to walk away from a relationship, I would sense a void for months and nurture a nostalgia for years. It is an ache that endures, a scar that forever welts the heart’s hinterland.
 
The truth is if anyone has entered my world, it was for a reason. Long after she has left, her footprint remains, cast as in concrete. No storm, no rain, not even the brightest spring to come can erase that print. Like Omar Khayyam’s moving finger, my life moves on, but the timeworn texts remain, however yellow they become, however faint the print.
 
I sometimes wonder what those old pages of my scroll mean. Are there embers of the old flame that could reignite in a flash? A thousand stories, a million lyrics have sprung on the theme, but I really don’t know the answer. The heart that pulsed then, pulses still, and will perhaps beat faster again to hear your voice, sensing the music that once convulsed my life. Maybe the glow of the past sunset will still redden our firmament.
 
But, who knows, maybe we will look at each other, as strangers on an unfamiliar planet, take uneasy measure of each other, find a familiar resonance in a glance or a gesture, then feel overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity of the newness, the strangeness, the dismaying, disheartening changes, and, with a polite word or smile, go our separate ways, reconciled to the absoluteness of our loss and the comforting melody of our souvenirs.

As I stepped out of my home, I came face to face with Myrna.
 
Myrna is the tousle-haired two-year old daughter of my neighbors, Jim and Jenna. This morning her hair looked even more tousled. She possibly slipped out of her home as soon as she woke up.
 
She was wearing a green frock and a bright yellow top and seemed to be keenly studying something in her hand.
 
The moment I said Hello, she turned to show me what she held in her hand. It was just a light-gray stone, a small one, almost an oversize pebble. It fitted neatly in her small palm.
 
I examined the stone and found nothing special about it. My face might have shown it. Myrna does not talk yet, but she pointed the stone with her little finger and wanted me to study it as well as she was doing it.
 
One would think she was holding Aladdin’s lamp in her hand. She reverently held the stone, gazed steadfastly at its invisible-to-me charm and even kept pointing at it repeatedly. Clearly, I was missing something.
 
Finally, I said to her, “Okay, let me take a close look,” and extended my open palm, signaling her to place the stone there.

​A moment’s hesitation, then she gently placed the stone on my hand. I adjusted my glasses, determined to take a very close look.
 
A plain oval stone, slightly elongated asymmetrically, gray in color, but the shade is marginally darker on one side. Then I noticed what I thought Myrna was pointing to: a tiny blue-black spot at the stone’s edge. It was easily overlooked, but Myrna’s avid investigation had revealed it to her. I looked at the spot keenly and found it dark blue at the edge but clearly black at the center.
 
I was amazed. I cross the walkway in front of my home twenty times each day, but I had never observed this stone – or any stone like it. Light gray, shaded, with a blue-black spot, with a dark ebony center. Myrna could have picked up the stone only from this walkway. It had taken a two-year old to find something unique that I hadn’t noticed – probably nobody had noticed – and surprise me with her discovery.

I keep a chair in the yard in front of my home, and I sat there to examine the stone further. Myrna stood expectantly by, waiting for something interesting to happen. Somehow, as I looked at the stone, I saw it with a new set of eyes. My point of view had morphed, for now I was trying to see the stone with the curiosity of a little girl. Suddenly a simple stone had gained a new significance, almost a new glow.
 
Just then Jenna came running.
 
“Good Heavens! You are here,” she said, in a tone of relief, to the child.
 
Then she turned to me and said, “I just opened the front door to get the newspaper. Just a moment or two. I had no idea Myrna had slipped out. I was looking for her all over the house!”
 
Jenna picked up Myrna in her arms and took her home, probably for her breakfast. The stone remained with me.
 
I sat in my chair and turned the stone over and looked at it from every possible angle. Yes, it was just an ordinary stone, a plain gray stone, indistinguishable perhaps from ten or twenty other stones on our walkway. It had gained a special significance only because a little girl picked it up, gave it all her attention and invested it with a remarkable aura that derived only from her marvelous, innocent curiosity.
 
It made me think of the thousand other things, lying all around me, in the walkway, on the next street, around all sides of my home, near the garage, on my deck, to which I paid no attention, for I assumed them all to be ordinary things that merited no attention. I gave them no importance; I had no curiosity about them; I had really no interest in them.
 
And then came a little girl, innocently picked up a stone, gave it all her focus and made it so very special.
 
I wonder how many things around me, on all sides, I overlook and neglect entirely, assuming them to be of no importance, while they shine in their unique beauty, just waiting for a set of curious eyes to spot them and give them all the significance they merit.