On one side of my living room, next to the large French window, is an old rocking chair. I love it. I don’t rock much, but I love to read the thick Sunday papers in the morning glimmer, sitting next to the window in that chair.
 
Sometimes visitors ask me where I got that chair, struck by its incongruous age in the company of my relatively new sofa set. I just say a friend gave it to me, no more. It has its own story though.

​The dentist had told me that my molars were causing problems and needed to be taken out. He referred me to a dental surgeon, who in turn set a date. I wanted to be his last appointment of the day, so that I could finish my work at the World Bank and still get the extraction done.
 
It was only when I arrived that the surgeon asked about an escort, because he said he would have to use general anesthesia, and somebody should guide me home. I had none, in a city I had just arrived. I said I would rather that, after the surgery, he asked his nurse to call a taxi to take me home. It was a Friday, and he seemed in a hurry to start his weekend. The moment I recovered, he came to say goodbye and left me in the care of his nurse.
 
The nurse was Clarissa, a youngish redhead. After finishing her chores and closing the office, she called a taxi. Then she found I was still in no condition to walk to the taxi. She lent me a shoulder, took me to the taxi and then had a second thought. She said, “You are in no shape to walk out to your home. I’ll take you to my apartment close by. You can rest an hour or two, and then go home in another taxi.”
 
I barely made it into her studio apartment before I collapsed. I remember hearing, “You better sleep it off” as she put me into a bed and pulled a blanket. I also have a fuzzy recollection of someone spooning vanilla ice cream in my mouth, murmuring, “The doctor said this will help soothe the pain.”
 
When I woke the next morning, the first thing I noticed was the hand on my chest. It was not mine and it had a silver bracelet. Then the angle of light from a window gave me the clearest clue that I was not in my bedroom. It was Clarissa’s. She had only a small loveseat in her tiny apartment and had been forced to share her bed with a stranger. It was the kindest thing she could do for a person in need.
 
I invited her for dinner the following weekend to thank her and we became friends.
 
When she married two years later, she introduced me to her husband, Donovan, and friends by saying, facetiously, that I was the one who slept with her, “without, even once, asking for (her) permission.” I responded lamely that I was “too high” to remember.
 
Donovan bought her the antique rocking chair for their wedding anniversary and, whenever I visited them, she invited me to sit there, for whatever she brought me to drink. I knew she loved the chair. I too liked it, its old-world oddity and its firm back and gentle swing. I liked it even more when Donovan said that she didn’t allow others to use it.
 
In their living room, the rocking chair occupied a place of honor for twenty years, though Donovan narrated with discomfiture that Clarissa always found a reason to steer guests away from the chair. They were allowed to admire it, but not sit on it.
 
When Donovan died of leukemia, Clarissa moved into an apartment in a retirement community, a smaller place that reminded me of her bachelor apartment. The rocking chair went there too, a symbolic placeholder for Donovan, she told me. I refrained from mentioning that she barely permitted him to occupy it.
 
Seven years later, Clarissa started losing her memory. She also had difficulty looking after her apartment. She moved into the assisted-living section of the community, where others looked after her. During the move, she told them to deliver the rocking chair to my address.
 
She said, laughingly, the next time I visited her, “I decided, just like you, not to ask permission.”
 
The antique rocking chair sits in my living room, rocking gently and supporting my back, as I sip coffee and read the Sunday papers. When I look at it, I think of Clarissa. It glows in the early light, a symbol of loyalty and kindness, understanding and enduring affection.

For about a month I have been sightless.
 
That is how I feel, but it is an overstatement. My right eye does not see, but my left eye works. It is the combination that is so discombobulating. I can’t clearly make out the edge of the sidewalk, or even the edge of the cup of tea in my hand.
 
I was sent home after eye surgery, for months of impatient recovery. The instructions were iron-clad. The first week keep your head down. Always, even when you sleep. Don’t take a shower. Eat light. Use eye drops day and night. Don’t lift any weight. Don’t move fast. In short, just sit and vegetate.
 
I can’t read. I can’t use computers. I can’t watch television. Since I can’t see, I can’t walk or drive. I live alone. The thought occurred: it is an ideal time to go on a fast, for I can’t even buy groceries. Maybe I will finally achieve the slender look I crave but cannot attain.
 
The bell rang.
 
My daughter has come, from the other end of the town, skipping office, to help me out. She has brought some strange contraptions: a folding mirror, which can let me watch television with my head down, and a donut-shaped cushion that will let me sleep with my face down.
 
An hour later the bell rang again.
 
My neighbor. “We heard of your surgery,” he said. “Here are some caramel poppers I made last night. Do try them. And let me know what you need. Milk, eggs, whatever.”
 
His wife said, “While I am here, I might as well start you on your eye drops.” She put the two drops in succession, then gently wiped the trickle from my face with a tissue.
 
Before I could ponder my misery the next morning, the bell rang impatiently yet again.
 
It was the attorney I had worked with in Honduras. She remains a friend and now lives in a distant suburb. I can barely make out the huge package she is carrying.

“Was told of the mishap,” she says breathlessly, “and decided to bring you seven dinners for the week.” Seven! I peer at the mountain she is struggling to insert in my refrigerator. She has also brought some blueberry-laden dessert and a pot of coffee and milk. So much for my futile ambition to achieve slim stardom.
 
Two days later, with barely a dent in my culinary wealth, turns up the young couple I befriended months ago, who live half a mile from my home.
 
“We are going grocery shopping, and thought we would take you with us, in case you need something.”
 
In the store they wouldn’t let me touch anything. All I had to do was to point, and they would pick up an item and place it in the trolley. On the way back, they stopped at Starbucks and got me the giant-sized macchiato they know I drink.
 
They seem to do a lot of grocery shopping, for on three successive occasions they have dropped two types of bread and three doses of macchiato.
 
Thursday. A card from my daughter: “Daddy, I hope you are doing all right. And your eye is getting better. Love you.”

Friday. An anxious call from my friend in Hong Kong: “Take all precaution. Don’t work too hard and exert your eye.”
 
Saturday morning. I have received ‘composed’ manuscripts from two publishers of my books that are about to be printed. I am mulling dejectedly how to revise those, when another neighbor’s nine-year-old daughter comes around with a plate.
 
“Mama made pancakes this morning. She thought you might like some.”

​Sunday afternoon. It is snowing. The flakes are coming down, slowly, beautifully, covering the ground, the bushes, the trees, even the leaves.

​The young couple’s car crunches on the snow outside my door. Astonishingly, even in this weather they are out shopping.
 
“We passed a Starbucks on the way back. Thought you might like a caramel macchiato.”
 
It is bitterly cold outside. But my heart is warm.

​When I see you again, I want you to take me in your arms.
 
I want you to forget the years that have separated us. And the silence that reared like a rampart between us.
 
I want you to take me, if you can, as the callow youth that came to know you, wanted to know more of you, and became hopelessly attached to you. I woke up every morning thinking of you, ran out in the first light of day to see how beautiful you were, watched every dusk slowly gather the tiniest drops of glimmer to unravel your darkest beauty and let me go to sleep with your mysterious, incandescent souvenir. Now I know I knew so little of you, but Heaven knows how obsessively I pursued you, how your strange aroma filled my heart, how you pervaded all my adolescent dreams.
 
Forgive me if I look different today. There are lines on my face and wrinkles on my hand. But you will recognize me yet. I still walk fast, and I still wear glasses. I still talk the same way. You must believe me when I say I still feel the same way.
 
I must be honest and admit that there have been a few other changes too. I have become a little more used to comfort. I am not running short of money all the time. I am a little healthier too. I don’t get stomach cramps any more. Maybe because I don’t drink the water you used to give me. Specialists have taken out some curious parasites from my entrails. Maybe they came from all that I ate from roadside vendors. I am quite well, thank you. I still run comfortably, though a trifle slowly.
 
You will be happy to know that I have two little girls. Not so little, really. They have grown up. They work, they are married. They cook, do laundry, party with friends. Occasionally they call their dad and fill his heart. They have not met you yet. I hope one day they get to know you and understand why you mean so much to me.
 
Yes, my life has changed a bit. You can’t take a man to the other end of the earth and expect no changes in his life. Some of my ways and habits have changed. But I have not changed. What really matters hasn’t changed one bit. I can feel it palpitating within me, in just the same way.
 
Otherwise, how do you explain this curious warmth I feel when I think of you? Like I am a kid again, falling in love, longing to see you, yearning to be near you, aching to hear the music of your voice? Why do I have to throw away the offer of a charming cruise or an exotic tour of Galapagos to rush every year to be with you? Why must I come, so compulsively, to your feet to know that I have done what I cannot do without?

You have changed too. You aren’t as young as when I first met you. You look different, so different that I sometimes feel I don’t have my bearing with you. I feel lost, even when I am in a place with you where I have been a thousand times. A thousand admirers have changed you, a million adorations of architects and engineers have made a difference to your looks. You have taken on a series of cosmetic changes that sometimes please me, sometimes exasperate me, but never fail to intrigue me. Age will never wither you, nor my distance fade your infinite variety.
 
What is this magical spell you hold over me, through years and decades? Not I alone, I know others who are as servile as me in their inept effort to be free of your wiles? To all of us, nothing compares with you. Other may be better, more congenial or more talented, but we want you. Our ambitions, our search for comfort or convenience, may take us elsewhere, but you haunt our dreams, run in our veins and, through winter and spring and summer, rule our passion.
 
For me, I have wandered far and wide, but in my loneliest hour and jauntiest moment, I think of you. I turn to you in my mind for respite and reassurance. And the absurd hope of recovering a fragment of my passion. I am no longer naïve enough to think of my youth as the peak of my life; nor do I think of my mature days as the start of an inglorious fadeout. My heart still beats, and I live a life resonant with effort and meaning. I flatter myself I have a clearer view of what matters, at least in my life.

​That is why, Kolkata, after an entire year, I am again at your door, knocking on a portal of my undying imagination and stubborn anticipation. I will never stop thinking of you and never stop hoping that I will pick up all the lost threads of my youth and memory, my flippant dreams and futile desires, my fanciful hopes and foolish heartbreaks. I am here to see your face. I am here to melt in awe.
 
You may stand indifferent, caring little for a legion of supplicants, and go your capricious way: let pedestrians stumble on ruined sidewalks, cars choke in narrow lanes and traffic gridlocks, patients wait interminably for medical relief, the old cough in buildings as frail as their bodies, day laborers trudge across and under bridges about to collapse, saffron fanatics and pious hacks coerce ‘donations,’ and children’s eyes blur and lungs blacken with grimy air. You will draw me still, irresistibly. Forever.
 
When Shakespeare makes Maecenas say of Cleopatra that Mark Antony “must leave her utterly,” we know he is right, for he should run from the fatal attraction of the enchantress. But we also know that Enobarbus is right when he replies, “Never, he will not.” The reason? “Other women cloy appetites they feed.” But, Kolkata, like Cleopatra, “makes hungry where most she satisfies.” 

​‘Everything beautiful is made for the eye of one who sees.’ Rumi
 
My plan was to visit India this winter, something I longed to do. My heart soared; but my plan plummeted.
 
A classic metaphor about optimism and pessimism is that a pessimist looks at a glass of wine as half-empty and an optimist sees it as half-full. Another version is that the pessimist sees the goblet and dreads the moment it will be empty, the last drop of wine gone; the optimist trusts the goblet will be refilled, probably with better wine. I was anticipating some leisurely hours on the plane, when I could calmly view the goblet the airlines passed me and the wine they served.
 
Shaw said an optimist invented the plane and a pessimist devised the parachute. Well, the optimist in me bought the ticket for India and the pessimist in me went for a last-minute medical check. Turned out the retina in my right eye was misbehaving badly. I needed an urgent surgery.
 
When the bandage came off, I saw nothing with my right eye. I was like the Greek mythical creature Cyclops, whose very name meant ‘round-eyed,’ just one eye. The difference was that a Cyclops had a powerful beam from its only eye, while mine was the same myopic, astigmatic, bespectacled eye. 

This caused some hilarious problems. The first was that I replicated a wine-sodden toper when I walked. Like the normal two-eyed person, I had no idea what monocular vision does to your gait. I had no sense of depth and I had no sense of balance. When we see with two eyes, because the eyes are in different sites they offer a three-dimensional picture of things. The picture changes radically with one eye. The steps on the staircase of my three-story house became hard to discern. I misjudged the door of my bedroom and bumped into it like a clumsy tippler. I poured water from a jug into a glass inches from my face and poured it actually outside the glass – on the table.
 
Nor could I walk with a confident stride. The balance that has been instinctive with me since I learned to walk holding my mother’s hand seemed to have suddenly abandoned me. The familiar garden path, the simple alley in front of my home all turned uncertain and wobbly. I walked a small distance with caution and without joy. The fun of a leisurely, carefree walk had made way for the shambling stagger of a dipsomaniac. I am told doctors have a daunting name for this, stereopsis, and they allow as much as a year for people to adapt to it if they lose an eye in an accident.
 
As the days passed, my dysfunctional eye began to see more than just black and dark-gray shadows. I seemed to perceive broad shapes and some colors. Slowly, with more days the shapes began to gain definition and the colors turned brighter. At the end of two weeks I finally and vaguely started making out objects.
 
I felt encouraged by what seemed an improvement of vision in my right eye. But now I had a new problem. As long the affected eye was shut or had practically no vision, my left eye did all the work. I could, for example, read a label or turn a door knob. Now that my right eye had started seeing things, though very poorly, my brain reverted to taking the inputs from both eyes as equally valid and processing them together. The result was utter confusion. I was not sure what I was seeing. Everything seemed like a confusing collage, of something clear and something seen through a jelly-smeared lens. To read even the largest sign, I had to put up a hand and block my right eye and let the left eye do its unhampered work.

​Of course, I would like to regain my normal vision. I read that over 90 per cent of people who undergo vitrectomy recover their sight. The small print says that the vast majority of them do not retrieve their full vision. That disconcerts me little. I have worn glasses since I was ten, when I first stumbled to adjust to bodily imperfection. I have long shed the illusion I was perfect in anything.
 
In a month, or more, the gas bubble the surgeon has inserted in my eye will slowly dissipate, and I will stop being Cyclops and see again with both eyes. I will walk comfortably and confidently again. I will see the blue sky and silver clouds. I will read and, hopefully, I will write.
 
The pessimist will say I have had a nasty experience. The cornered but resolute optimist in me keeps reminding that I will visit India again.

Now is the winter of my discontent. I don’t feel quite as despondent as Shakespeare’s Richard III. Nor do I have his murderous plans. But winter, as I am experiencing it now in Washington leaves me far from content.
 
Most days now the temperature rises to a maximum of 4 ̊C and sinks to -4 ̊C by midnight.
​
A cardigan will not of course do. Nor would even a well-padded parka or wind-cheater. You must have a combination of both to keep winter’s devilry at bay. If you are going to some occasion, your jacket has to have the added layer of a heavy overcoat. I dislike carrying all this load, but I have no option.
 
This is not all when the mercury sinks further. I have to wear thermal vests and underwear and remember to put on extra-thick socks. I have to wear gloves, not the slick ones that look as elegant as the waiters’ at Ritz, but heavy gloves of the kind that loggers or drillers use. Worst of all, since I shave my head and am vulnerable to snow and sun alike, I have to put on a cap.
 
Since my earliest days I have associated headgear with decrepit old men. Or at best with with policemen and soldiers, for whom I hold no great admiration, thanks to my exposure to those arrogant classes in colonial India and racist USA. Yet, now when I brave an early-morning jog or a late-night carousal, the keen cold air induces me to take on a Sherlock Holmes look and cover my head. A generous friend has gifted me a dark French beret that I find much better than a hat or a cap. Particularly as I can fold it and put it in my pocket and not lose it in trains, libraries or restaurants.
 
Once dressed in all this regalia, I step out. I walk along the familiar trail to the lake nearby, large trees all around me. They are all denuded, shorn of their leaves, still royally holding their ground and waiting for spring to bring them a green splendor. There are no ripples in the lake; the surface is iced. There is a sign warning enthusiastic skaters to stay away, for the ice layer is thin and fragile. The sun is beginning to glint on the ice.
 
As I walk back, I don’t see any of the regular walkers on the road. The freezing air has kept the others indoors. For easy-going like me, the elaborate robing and disrobing may also be a damper. I miss the lighthearted Hello and Good Morning that passersby throw at each other. Never mind. Bravely, I trudge along, though my heart craves for my warm living room and a warm cup of coffee.
 
Just as I had given up the idea of meeting anybody else on the trail, suddenly there appears a young boy, coming this way, almost rushing. As he comes close, and I am about chime a word of greeting, the person speaks, and I realize it is a young woman. She is covered in a heavy overcoat and her hair is neatly tucked in a rainbow woolen cap, but her voice is that of a woman. It is plaintive.
 
“Excuse me, could you help me, please?”

​Apparently, she came out of her house nearby for a walk with her grandfather, and, after just a few steps, he had slipped on an ice sliver on the road and fallen flat on his back. It had rained the night before, and during the nightly drop in temperature some remaining water on the road had frozen into ice patches. Her grandfather could not get up by himself, and she could not pull him up. She needed help and needed it quickly, before the cold got the better of the old man.
 
We rushed to the spot. Fortunately, grandpa hadn’t hurt his head or broken a bone. Unfortunately, he wasn’t easy to lift, for he was a corpulent man. I am no Samson and weight lifting is not my strong point. Anna, the granddaughter, and I maneuvered to get him to sit him upright on the road, and now lay the tougher job of getting him to stand. Anna was too small to help much. After a number of false starts, I was finally able to heave grandpa to his feet.
 
But he seemed too uncertain on his feet without any support. There was no option but to put his heavy right arm on my shoulder, grab his waist and slowly inch our way to their home. It wasn’t far, but making it was still a near thing. When I dropped him on a soft in their drawing room, I sighed with relief and prepared to leave.
 
But grandpa would have none of it. He thanked me extravagantly and went to the hyperbolical length of declaring that I had saved his life. I suggested that he should have himself checked by a doctor if he felt any serious pain after a few hours. In return he suggested that I should stay back and have a cup of tea with me.
 
Anna had taken off her heavy coat and cap and quickly produced a very welcome cup of tea.
 
As I was sipping my tea, I noticed in the corner of the room a wooden box with sets of small iron bars of varying weight.
 
I asked Anna if she did exercises with the iron weights.
 
“Not me,” said Anna, “Grandpa uses them sometimes. You see, he used to be a champion weightlifter.”
 
I resisted the temptation to claim that I was the greater champion, for having lifted his weighty frame without any training at all.

Pauline was a young nurse, Joanna slightly older, both with years of experience.
 
They said in unison, “You will be all right.”
 
It was a well-meant word of reassurance. I tried hard to find some comfort in my unease.
 
I had gone earlier to an optometrist for a normal refraction testing. One look and an ominous frown marked the young doctor’s placid face, “You are about to lose your right eye.”
 
He quickly called a retina specialist and I heard him drop the word “emergency.” I was rushed to the specialist who barely took a glance before saying, ”The retina in your right eye is detached and the condition is serious.” I heard the word “emergency” a second time as he called the hospital to arrange an immediate surgery.
 
Now I was in the hands of Joanna and Pauline, who took my weight, height and pressure and kept dripping drops of caustic liquid in my eye. My shirt and trouser had already been switched to a floral-design cotton gown and a long needle inserted in my left arm.

​A tranquilizer had nearly calmed me for the oncoming ordeal when came a shock. A young, boyish-looking person, whom I would have taken for a hospital orderly in training, turned up and said, “Mr. Nandy, I am Dr. Linden, your surgeon.” Heavens! This was my highly experienced, brilliantly credentialed surgeon! A respected practitioner, he looks like a recent college graduate.
 
I was wheeled into a mammoth operation theater, a team of doctors and nurses introduced themselves, and I meekly explained how my name is pronounced while they strapped me to the gurney and fixed my head with tapes. More drops, some anesthesia, more tapes, and finally some opaque stuff on my eye.
 
I have gone through unpleasant medical procedures before and have learned a trick or two. When I am immobile in a position and can do little else, I simply make the best use of the time: I go into meditation. I sense calm, I feel I am making a good use of my time, and I certainly experience less pain or discomfort.
 
The anasthesia is local and I can hear the operating staff talk. I can hear the surgeon tell his assistant, “Let’s over to the other side,” and, more interestingly, a nurse talk of her vacation in the Bahamas, “The warm sand felt quite wonderful on my bare feet.” She might have followed with something more salacious, but I returned to my practised rhythm of breathe-in, breathe-out. I felt calm and assured, no matter the outcome.

​The surgeon later told me the tear in my eye was extensive. That must have been why the procedure took longer than usual, over an hour. The idea of sucking out the vitreous material in my eye and pumping in gas sounded daunting when I read it in advance, but the process – with the presence of a youthful but confident doctor and serene, kindly nurses –seemed unexpectedly benign.
 
I was wheeled back to my alcove by a slender, attractive nurse. The anasthesia notwithstanding, I knew my mind was in good shape as I kept wondering how she looked with her hair flowing, without the constraint of a shapeless hospital cap.
 
Lina, my daughter, came to retrieve me, and I instantly spotted her look of shock. With a massive bandage obscuring half my face, anybody would be excused for fearing she had encountered Frankenstein’s monster. A stern-faced nurse gave me my discharge instructions: no aperitif (just what I needed then), no shower (the thing I most wanted), the lightest of meals, and, worst of all, three days of keeping my head constantly down. This was worse than the worst punishment any school master had ever dealt me. I consoled myself with the thought that it was symbolic of the way most people, especially most women, seem to spend their whole life: they keep their head down and do whatever others expect of them.
 
A week has since passed. The bandage is off, but the right eye still sees little. Vision, I am told, will take longer to return, if I am lucky. People may be in a quandary to decide what wacky kind of an alcoholic am I that I can maintain a normal white left eye while my right eye is blotched and blood-red. I suspect I might look even wackier were I to don dark glasses during these dark wintry days in Washington. Whatever my ghastly appearance, I can now stand up and look around and see the world – and not, as it seems, with the most of mankind, keep my head down.
 
That is possibly what Joanna and Pauline meant when they said that I would be all right.

I remembered Deepika as a charming, lively person who worked with my brother. Though, my brother whispered in a muffled voice, she suffered from an insidious affliction. Multiple Sclerosis. She showed no sign of it, except a slow gait, but there was no knowing how it would evolve. Meanwhile, I was happy to hear that she had a good standing as a reporter and her prospects were bright.
 
Later I heard from my brother that Deepika had married a distinguished editor and had carried on as an enterprising reporter.
 
I met her again after twenty years when I visited Mumbai. She was a widow now and lived in a tidy, sunlit apartment in Worli. She did some reportorial work, but she was now mainly a columnist and writer. This had to do with her syndrome, which had worsened and made movement less convenient for her.
 
With evident pride, she introduced me to her son, who, by now, was a known script-writer in Bollywood, and his wife, who too wrote and edited scripts. They worked together and had a loyal clientele.
 
Though Deepika was cheerful and competently handled her professional life, I could see how arduous it had become for her to do the usual chores. I thought of the iron will needed to run around the city and do the work she did so energetically. She had given a full measure of devotion to her husband and family, brought up her only son with care and affection, and now struggled alone to live a decent life. It wasn’t easy, neither emotionally nor economically.
 
Her parents were professional people, but she had seen them suffer financially at the end of their lives. She didn’t want that. She worked unremittingly. She wanted to remain independent, in her means and in her way of living.
 
More than her financial straits, what concerned her more was her relationship with her son. This surprised me because I believed, like others that knew her, that she had a good relationship with her only child.
 
Good, but distant. Very distant. He was, by all accounts, a charming person. Responsible too. If she was sick, he inquired, occasionally came to visit her too. If it was serious and she needed to go to the hospital, he sent his car with the driver. At long intervals, he would come to see her, often with his wife, and she was delighted. She cooked, she cleaned, she waited eagerly for the precious hour or two her son could spend with her. But, then, too soon, he would be gone, and her home seemed a little desolate.

Of course, she understood that he was busy. He worked on his own and could not afford to lose a client. He was hard-pressed to meet the untimely demands of unreasonable clients. Business was tight, time scarce. She understood that he had to have his life, spend time with his wife. But understanding is not the same as filling the void in your heart. She missed him.
 
She missed him acutely. She recalled the halcyon years of his childhood when she forever held him in her arms. How she taught him to walk, to eat with his hands, to read the first letters. She remembered his fondness for birds and animals. His first fearful, excited day in school. His new playmates and lost playthings. Did he ever think of those days now, when he was right next to her heart?
 
He hero worshipped his father. He recalled fondly the times he went for a walk with his father, the books his father read to him when he hadn’t started to read, the admiration he evoked with many as a reputed editor. His mother’s role he seemed to take for granted, as if she did what all mothers did and what was normal, even usual. It did not measure up to anything special, that needed mention or even some recall. No, he wasn’t ungrateful. He seemed just forgetful.
 
When I listened to her, I remembered how preoccupied I was when I started my career, to the periodic neglect of my aging parents. I tried to defend her son and explained how frantic the pace of business was these days. She knew all that. She had told herself, a thousand times, the many reasons that kept her son elsewhere. She had reasoned with herself that he could not come because he had work to do. He could not even call because he had to attend to his clients. She did not need my explanations or my pleadings on his behalf.
 
She kept herself busy with her work. She met with her colleagues and friends regularly. She was dutiful in attending to social chores or sick relatives. She did all that a professionally accomplished woman can do to fill her empty hours. She was in full possession of her life.
 
Yet, at the end of the day, as she sat in her neat apartment and watched in the window the dark advancing with an ominous quiet, she knew that sleep will tarry to land on her restless eyes and the last lingering thought will still be that of a son that she seldom saw but perpetually enshrined in her fitful dreams. 

​During my college days I had once expressed an interest in the legal profession, only to evoke a strong reaction from my friend Bipul, “I would rather be a streetwalker than a lawyer.” I later found that his father was a distinguished lawyer and the president of the local bar association. When I underwent a minor surgery and spoke of the reputed surgeon, another friend, Samir, commented that “it was better to be a butcher than a surgeon, it was honest.” Other friends told me that Samir’s dad was the city’s best-known orthopedic surgeon.
 
My brother became a celebrated psychologist and wrote a shelf-ful of books about things as diverse as films and cricket, in the process making mincemeat of my heroes on the pitch and heroines on the screen. But long before this could implant in me an appropriate loathing of his profession, I came across a stray article in Stephen Spender’s magazine Encounter. It was an analysis of Woodrow Wilson, the American President, written in collaboration with a US diplomat. It was a scintillating piece, eye-opening and cerebrum-lifting. The author was Sigmund Freud.

I promptly went and got hold of some of his books. I had seldom, before or after, been so thrilled to read anybody. The depth of analysis, quality of exegesis, style of writing, all left me breathless. I conceived a love of psychology that never left me. Though nowhere near the same league, I have encountered other psychologists who have enthralled me with their ideas.
 
I presume there are practicing psychologists who do wonders for their clients. I cannot get out of my mind the remarkable psychologist Ms. Lowenstein, played by Barbra Streisand, in the movie Prince of the Tides. Given my admiration for their science, it is a pity that the psychologists I have encountered in real life have been, for want of a better word, so pitiable.
 
Just out of the university, I had gone for a job interview with Unilever and I was told to meet their psychologist. Dr Patil’s entire style was one of haughty condescension, derisive of the hapless candidate who had to undergo his interrogation. He tossed intrusive questions and almost mocked answers you gave. He played the time-honored trick of asking you to draw a picture of a tree. If you drew it in outline, he would accuse you of being superficial; if you drew it in detail, he would dub you a detail-obsessed micro-manager. He asked me the well-worn question of what I expected in ten years; when I suggested more interesting and responsible work, he countered, “How can commercial work be interesting?”

I wondered how an international company could have engaged such a mountebank and said as much when a psychologist I knew later joined Unilever. Her reply was candid, “There are many charlatans in our profession, and some of them make a good living.” No doubt, by preventing others from making a good living.
 
I worked for a European company with generous medical benefits and I went to see the city’s most famous psychologist. As a young person I felt I wasn’t doing that well in my relationships, including those with women, and naively imagined I could gain some insights. When I told him my expectation, his first question was, “How regularly do you visit brothels?” I told him I didn’t, but he persisted by naming two red-light districts, and again asked, “When was you last congress with a prostitute?” Frustrated, I pointedly told him that, when I talked about improving my relationships, I was talking about human relationships, not physical ones. Now he seemed frustrated, as if I was balking a meaty theme. He looked crestfallen, like a puppy whose bone has been snatched away. He promised – ‘threatened’ seemed the right word – that he would explore more the next time. I never went back.

​For a World Bank assignment, I considered hiring a psychologist and one came to the office for a discussion. While he sat in a corner, I completed a meeting with an associate. When the associate left, the psychologist, doubtless to impress me, began giving me, unasked, a psychological profile of the associate he had heard or rather overheard. I was amazed. He misread my silence as encouragement and went on a more detailed analysis. Now I was truly aghast, that a professional psychologist, on such a slender basis, should offer confident opinions on a complex human being, with complacency and without hesitation. I ended our discussion as soon as I could and never called him again.
 
My fourth experience was a subtler one but made me aware of the pitfalls of self-confident psychologists. My wife and I went for marital counseling to two distinguished highly recommended psychologists, who were a couple and offered joint counseling to us. They were thoughtful, perceptive counselors whose views I respected, but I quickly began to see how culture-bound and ethnocentric their marital views were. They simply could not perceive the small but infinite little differences in cultural mores that different societies present and create a host of issues in an intercultural marriage such as mine. While we completed the planned sessions, I had a lesson in the handicap of culture-bound psychologists who do not realize the implications of social cultures and traditions and cannot help their clients in a lasting way.

Like everybody else, I like to live among people who like one another. And also like their neighbors. That is hardly the situation in the country I am now: Americans never despised one another so much for their political views. Such polarization is a common subject of talk.
 
“It pains me,” said Rabbi Goldberg, “to see young people in Israel marching with a sign saying Death to Arabs. Where do they get such hate?”
 
We were talking in a quiet Washington hotel lobby. He was in town to speak in a seminar on political divides and the hate it generates.
 
“So many of our poems and movies are about love,” he said. “Our religions talk a lot about love. One of them goes to the length of saying, ‘Three things last forever, faith, hope and love, and of these the greatest is love.’”
 
“But,” he continued, “what we seem to see much of the time is its opposite – hate. There is explicit, rabid hate or there is controlled and covert hate. It is hate all the same. Utter repulsion and rejection of the other person. Total aversion for the other side, their creed or country, their party or principles, their values or even their value as human being. People want to see them stamped out, destroyed.”

He was in his seventies, a tall, athletic man. A respected scholar, he spoke at a think tank briefing and we lunched together. He had visited India in the sixties as a young student and heard horrid stories of Hindu-Muslim butchery during pre-partition violence. He had again visited India recently and visited the reopened Nariman House where Rabbi Holtzberg and his wife were killed by Islamic terrorists.
 
Rabbi Goldberg sipped his tea and said, “Of all types of hate, surely the most hateful is religious hate. For it is the most pretentious and hypocritical. We pretend to act on behalf of a loving God, but spew hatred against other children of God. We pretend to do good for society, and we do the most abominable things. We pretend to stand up for noble principles, and we do ignoble, unprincipled acts.”
 
Clearly, the terrorist violence in Mumbai bothered him, for he knew the city well and felt close to its Chabad center. He recounted the dozen coordinated bombs of 1993, the bombing of markets and bus stations in 2003 and the murderous railway bombs of 2006, all by Muslim groups. He understood the impatience of Indians who wanted strong punitive action, not only against Pakistan but against all groups in India they suspected of sympathy for such brutality. He mentioned the friends he had among people who had to leave their homes in West or East Pakistan and seek refuge on Indian soil – and restart life painfully

​“Where do we go from here? Are surgical or massive responses the answer?” he asked. He quoted the Hasidic leader Kotzker Rebbe: peace is when you let it in.
 
He believed the divide between India and its biggest neighbor could be bridged and the initiative had to come from India. It had the resources and people and imagination to do it. And its history and tradition to back it.
 
I read Sanskrit and it amazed me that Rabbi Goldberg was such a master of the ancient Indian texts to which most Indians give lip service. He cited Gita’s 14th chapter that spoke in the same breath of charity and authority in the role of the warrior.
 
This is what the people of India had done in the past, accepted and absorbed other cultures and made them part of India’s magnificently varied culture. Occasionally hesitant, but fearless, it had broadened its repertoire of knowledge, art and statecraft, given home to different faiths.
 
Rabbi Goldberg said, “It pains me that there is a new air of intolerance. A new attitude, endorsed officially, to separate and discriminate against minority groups. A new mentality of Us and They. They can’t be trusted, must be cornered and punished for being different. Now, you draw attacks if you say the Ship of State is going the wrong way – a very dangerous way.”
 
He had been astonished to find that even young children were being brought up on ahistorical textbooks that denigrate ancient Emperors of a different religion or modern leaders who fought chauvinism and fanaticism in their time. He quoted Krishna’s famous diatribe to Arjuna against ‘demonic inheritance’ and said the country would make a mistake to take that hideous turn and move away from what Krishna had called a ‘divine inheritance.’
 
“This is not the India I had fallen in love with as a young man,” he said ruefully. “Such hate is a bigger threat to people there than a terrorist waving an AK-47.”
 
Rabbi Goldberg took a last sip of his tea, shook my hand, smiled warmly and shuffled toward his room. The lobby was getting noisier by the minute with the advent of Chinese tourists and middle-age executives on their way to the bar.
 
I would have loved to have a drink too, but I hated the prospect of winding my way later through downtown traffic. As I drove cautiously home, my mind kept returning to the discerning Rabbi’s words about love and a lot of hate.

In a little over an hour’s drive from my home is a wondrous place, the Shenandoah National Park. I love going there: suddenly out of the comfort of a closed airconditioned place, known and familiar, into an open space, mountains and gorges, birds and butterflies, and rows and rows of resplendent trees, glorious, shiny trees, decked in the fringes by the defiant yellow of Black-eyed Susans and the pure white of Saint Ann’s Laces. I love being uncomfortable, going up and down rough-hewn, unpaved tracks to see hills and waterfalls, and realizing how small, frail and insignificant I am in the cosmos.

I love it even more when I don’t have to drive there, for Audrey turns up in her clean, new-smelling car, with maps and catalogs, sunglasses and sun-blocks, snacks and water bottles, and says authoritatively, “Hop in.” She bears with my ill-organized, ill-prepared ways, drives all the circuitous way, and reaches the park without a single wrong turn.
 
This is Sunday, but we are early, and the park has few visitors. If Sunday means the day of the sun, it applies, because even at this early hour the day is bright, and the mountains bathed in the morning translucence. The park has a paved serpentine road, that winds up the mountains and winds down the other side. You can stop every few hundred yards at outlook spots, jutting out of the hills, where you can look around, relax, take photos. 

It feels refreshing to step out of the car and breathe the cool mountain air. In no time I feel the difference in my breathing and realize that I am at an altitude of 4000 feet. Near my feet, beyond a stone ridge, there is the sheer fall of the hillside, thick with plants and the density of evergreens. Beyond that, you see the cloud-encircled green mountains. And beyond that too are the azure sunlit outline of the remote mountains.
 
The park came into being in 1935, though environmentalists, including a President, had tried to midwife it earlier. Its birth was an interesting model of official and private effort. Private donors gave land and money. The government lent its muscle, evicting people who occupied the grounds: residents were compensated, squatters were made to go. When I first visited the park in 1978, the last occupant was still holding on. Annie Shenk vacated the following year; she was 92 and died.

Securing 300 square miles wasn’t easy, especially as it was spread over eight counties of Virginia, and the state government was to hand over the park eventually to a Federal agency. Fortuitously, the job creation program of President Roosevelt during depression years came of help. 100,000 people worked on creating the park, and particularly the hundred-mile long Skyline Drive, the winding road that snakes through the Blue Ridge mountains and makes their beauty accessible to us.
 
Curious as it may sound, I miss the geologist colleagues I had during my mining days when I come to the park. Particularly, I miss my Dutch friend, Henk van Veelen, who would look at a stone and start telling me its history. The crest of the mountain range in the park divides the drainage basins of Shenandoah, Potomac, James and Rappahanock rivers. Perhaps that is the reason I have never seen such beautiful rocks anywhere else. There are exquisite granitic rocks a billion years old, and volcanic, sedimentary and clastic rocks half that old. Covered with moss, washed by rain, they sit there with incredible majesty and make me marvel.

The park has a resort, lodges and some charming cabins, even a fishing retreat. What it has most of are trails. 500 miles of trails, leafy, picturesque trails that rise and drop and coil endlessly. You can keep walking, to the sound of the mountain breeze and the gentle, gurgling sound of the waterfalls. You could hike one to four miles to the waterfalls, but you don’t have to see them. You can hear them, seemingly all around you. You can walk silently and feel the peace surround you.
 
I wish you would come with me and walk alongside me in these mountains. Enough of cars and computers and comfort. Just bring yourself and step beside me. You don’t have to do anything, not even talk to me or look at me. I just want to sense you next to me. It is quite enough to know that you are there, with your indulgent smile and fragrant hair. As the dusk settles beyond the azure hills, I will long for the assurance of a benign presence.