​
It was a bright, cold winter morning when she decided to make up her mind. To stay or to leave. For a fourteen-year-old, it wasn’t an easy choice, for it was a life-turning decision. To stay in her parents’ home or to go out into the world – without the slightest idea about what to expect.
 
Her mother was alienated from her relatives; she couldn’t turn to them. She knew nobody else except a few neighbors and tradesmen in her small town in Virginia. She had saved a few dollars from the odd jobs she did for the local grocery and a dress shop. That saving would not go far in a city. It was a city she had to go to, for that is where she was likely to find work and shelter.

​Her father had died five years ago and her mother had married, the summer before last, a man nobody thought well of save her mother. He worked as a mason but earned so little that she knew he leaned on her mother. His bitter sarcasm was loathsome, his occasional intimate moves even more so. It wasn’t safe to live under the same roof with him.
 
She waited for the weekend when her mother and stepfather went out together for a drink. She had checked the bus time earlier. Now she packed the suitcase she had hidden under her bed, wrote a note to her mother, went to the depot and bought a ticket for Richmond. Once there, she trudged her way to the local church that she knew had a shelter for girls.
 
That is how her new life began. The church found her a cleaning job nearby. She found a second job on her own, looking after a widow’s two small children while she held an evening job at a call center. After four months, she also took a part-time responsibility at the church itself which earned her a few more dollars. Once she was sure of her three-way allocation of time, she went back to school.
 
I was talking with Moira, the Outreach Supervisor of the Richmond church. She also served on the county’s board that looked after refugee rehabilitation and that is how we had met because of my work. Her formal blue-gray dress and quiet demeanor might have suggested a woman of fifty, but her sprightly responses combined with her ready smile made me place her in the early forties. I had asked her about the background of the average woman in their shelter and she had started on a typical case history. Moira pushed a newly brewed cup of coffee toward me and resumed the story.
 
The girl worked long hours, slept a few hours and devoted every available minute to her class lessons. She graduated creditably from high school and the church considerately reduced her hours and increased her pay. The widow found her a job at the call center, where she quickly became a star employee. In three years straight she finished college, securing a scholarship the last two years.
 
She received other job offers, but she decided, from a sense of gratitude, to work for the church in its outreach department. This is where she came across some refugees from South America and East Asia and felt deeply committed to help. She identified with them, for she was once a refuge seeker herself, and she contributed hours of service in the county to help them. She even learned some Spanish to connect with people from Salvador and Guatemala. Her outreach work in the church also slowly veered more toward poor and helpless refugees.
 
When Moira stopped, she knew she had let out the secret. What she began telling me was the case history of the shelter’s average denizen; what she had ended up with – it was clear to us both – was her very personal story of survival and success. She had overcome overwhelming odds and achieved her goal of doing what she felt was important to do.
 
What Moira did not know was the surprise I was about to spring her. The county board had decided that they wanted to create a new position of a Refugee Director and we had informally agreed to make the offer to Moira. We had already quietly gathered some of her personal data from the church and I was asked to explore more by personally talking to her. Now I knew her full story and I felt I could confidently tell the board that Moira was the right person for the job.
 
I said, “Moira, I have not been entirely candid with you. I am something special to tell you, and your story was the right place to start.” I then told her that the board wanted her for the new position, which would be an important position where she could continue her life’s chosen work. I added that she could continue her church work as a volunteer.
 
Moira was touched and overwhelmed. She would be able to contribute to the refugee community far more than before.
 
I still had a personal curiosity, but I hesitated. “Are you in touch with your parents?”
 
“My stepfather died three months ago. I have persuaded my mother to come and live with me as soon as she can sell the small house she owns.”
 
This too was characteristic of Moira.

​Last Sunday I did something spectacular. I flew a kite for several hours. It was a bright and beautiful day, and the winds were just right. It helped that the park was nearly deserted; nobody got in my way. It was nearly perfect. The only glitch was that there was nobody else to fly a kite, nobody to fight with.

​To say “Go fly a kite” in the US is not a friendly admonition, but equivalent to saying, “Go jump in the lake.” But, if one were to act on the advice instead of getting offended, I believe one would discover a whole new world. It is a pity that few fly kites in the US. The Americans are missing a lot: baseball and bowling simply don’t cut the mustard.
 
Vir was my tutor when I evinced interest in flying kites. He lived next door to us in India and was a legend for his exploits in the cut-throat kite universe. For long I had watched impassively the colorful panoply of kites in the smoky Kolkata sky. Finally I had persuaded my parents to advance me the money for a string-winder spool called latay and two kites.
 
We lived in a tall apartment building with an extensive terrace, the ideal base for aerial exploration. I loved to be on the terrace, making my kite rise little by little, higher and still higher. Until it was safe to scamper to the left or right, without the fear of my kite suddenly diving with an adverse wind and getting lost. I learned to take advantage of the mildest breeze and slowly earned the skill of maneuvering my kite at will. Vir came to help me, at first to teach me the basics and then to show me the subtleties of kite manipulation.
 
Vir was a couple of years older than me and worked as a lowly assistant in a grocery store. He couldn’t get a better job, for he was a middle-school dropout. But I admired his encyclopedic knowledge of kites. Unlike the Chinese and Japanese experts, Indian aficionados do not use kites of vastly different shapes and sizes. Indian kites are usually diamond-shaped and short-tailed, distinguished by simple, streamlined designs and quaint names. Vir taught me all: Candle, Glass, Ball, Heart, Betel and Star, displaying those designs; two-colored kites called DoubleBall, NorthSouth, EastWest, BronzeFaced or DogEared, depending on the distribution of their colors; three- and four-colored kites; and lavishly colored kites called Peacock. Though I longed for a peacock, I went, short-funded, for Glass or BronzeFaced whichever was cheaper.
But I had to take the next step in short order. Though I was content to fly on my own and watch my kite streaking across the clouds, I had to reckon there were many other kites in the sky. The reckoning came in the most painful way. I was quietly flying on my own a Thursday afternoon, a festival day, when another kite approached swiftly, without warning. It swooped down like lightning, placed its thread on mine, and quickly released the abrasive thread to snap my line. In a second, my blue-yellow Glass kite, chopped tetherless, floated like a lost cloud and was gone. I was disconsolate, not just because I didn’t have money for another kite. My pride, not to mention my sense of assurance, was dented. I had to do something.
 
Vir’s expertise came of use. “It is a kite-eat-kite world,” he said firmly. “Even if you want to stay by yourself, the predators will come and eat you alive. You have to defend yourself.”
 
That meant a full battle cry. I had to learn the strategy and maneuvers of kite war and I had to have the abrasive thread that can decapitate an aggressive kite. I became Vir’s avid apprentice and quickly mastered the push-pull-turn of kite warfare. Then we set about creating the finest killing thread. We ground glass, added adhesive and turmeric for color, passed the thread through this monstrous mix and then dried it before winding it around the spool. Now we had the murderous thread to kill or be killed.
  
The next few weeks were exciting. I lost several kites, but I also felled several adversaries. I found it embarrassing to call out the victory word, Wo katta, but my mentor had no such compunction and hollered at every turn. If by chance the chopped kite flew in my direction, we had the bonus of gaining an additional kite. It was the modern equivalent of the ancient, brutal practice of gathering a scalp.
 
Last Sunday, I stood on high ground in a Virginia park and saw my beautiful blue-green kite rise deftly, higher and higher and still higher. Its colors flitted gloriously against the sun-drenched late-morning blue heavens. My heart sang. I was no longer an aging man in a foreign land. I was back again in Kolkata, a sprightly adolescent on the terrace of a tall building, thrilling to the rapture of something senseless and sensational, my unbounded soul rising with every ascent of my kite, higher and higher, until it reached the acme of peace and beauty and total fulfillment.

​I have an interest in languages and learned a number of them. I have tried my hand at writing in three of them and translated from another three. Bengali, my mother tongue, and English, my acquired love, are the two closest to my heart. I continue to write professionally in both of them, and that led to a strange discovery.
 
To meet a deadline or in anticipation of one, I sometimes write two or three columns for a publication. After writing three columns in succession for an English publication, when I turn to write an article in Bengali I feel a strong resistance within me. In fact, it appears to be an unpleasantly difficult chore. I have to remind myself that it is my first language and I have written a book in it before I can persuade myself to sit down and write a piece in Bengali. The reverse is also true. If I write a bunch of articles successively in Bengali, it seems an onerous, uncomfortable enterprise to write anything in English. Again, as I force myself to the task, the discomfort dissolves and my computer keyboard eventually
gets rattling.
 
I was mystified. What lay behind this persistent, powerful resistance?
 
That made me ask a more fundamental question. Why do I write in two different languages? What makes me seek out a second language to express myself when I am already doing so in one?
 
The true answer is so clear to me that it amazes me that I had not realized it before. The two languages are two totally different media. I cannot do in the one what I can do in the other. I sense freedom and fluidity when I write something that intrigues me in the language of my choice. Were I to try and write the same thing in another language, I would feel constrained. The two languages seem to offer me two different spheres of operation. I would not dream of trying to do in a second language what I have done in the first.
 
This may seem farfetched, for in the world today things are constantly being presented in different languages. I have no doubt that a computer manual or a tourist guidebook can be prepared competently in two or more languages. A creative product, an essay or a novel, is rather a different thing. You might object that novels and even poems have been translated in many languages. Frankly, I would think of the original and the translation as very different products. A translated story or a poem – I have myself tried both – makes an impact quite different from the original, and it serves well those who cannot read the original. But the emotional charge of the one is a quantum leap from that of the other.
 
What I have realized is that, emotionally and culturally, I enter a wholly different realm when I move from one language to another. I have always hated changing homes, even when I am moving to a far better home. I find it more than uncomfortable; it is nearly traumatic for me. That is precisely the sensation I have when I switch from one language to another. It is distasteful. But once I have gotten into my stride and have written in a language for a while – in the way I have lived in a new home for several months and grown accustomed – I have found my place in a new universe and enjoy my stay in it. But the sensation of transition is discombobulating.
 
Even this characterization is superficial. If my language is a universe that envelopes me, it shapes the way I think and feel and write, it gives me pause to think of the helpless creature I seem to be in the face of the whole complex of my genes, my upbringing, my modeling on my parents, my sibling relations, my community, my city, my country, my school and university and my work in different institutions. If these have all covertly but comprehensively influenced me, what remains of my individuality, my vaunted objectivity or impartiality? Do I know which way I am turning inwardly and why? Am I helplessly, like a whirling weather cock, at the mercy of veiled, vast forces, to which I must bow, without even knowing when and why?
 
It gives me a clue to the vaunted impartiality of critics and scholars, who have to pretend to judge works of art or literature solely on their merit, and not on their appeal to surreptitious elements that lie alive but dormant within them, as much as in me.
 
Writing has sometimes been described as a journey of exploration. It has certainly been for me an adventure of disconcerting discovery.

I asked a few friends about Faulkner’s remark that the American truly loves – not his wife or children or country – only his car. They looked uneasily at one another, as if I had broached a risqué theme, and said that, while the comment seemed a trifle exaggerated, Faulkner knew what he was talking about.
 
When I took a new job in Washington thirty miles from home and found that several colleagues lived in my neighborhood, I asked if they would like to carpool with me. They would not. Their reaction was one of horrified disbelief. One condescended to explain the negative response. “In the office, we are bullied by our bosses,” he said, “and, at home, we are bullied by our wives. Our only moment of freedom and peace is when we are in the car. You want to spoil that with a carpool?”

​Americans perhaps are not the only ones who love their cars. They are also perhaps not the only ones who feel a sense of unbounded freedom in their cars, free of their superiors or spouses for a while. I remember how happily I drove around Kolkata streets, no matter the frequent potholes and traffic jams. In the US, I often do a thousand-mile trip through the hills of West Virginia or the fields of South Carolina, savoring the air of green pastures and the espresso of rest-stop Starbucks. Hardened travelers must wonder why a bespectacled man sits in a roadside café, peering out of a frosting window, occasionally sipping cherry coke and pecking at a laptop keyboard.
 
I am not overly fond of my car, nor am I trying to escape anyone’s bullying. Yet I feel a strange air of insouciance when I scurry out of city traffic, turn on the cruise control and drive on the interstate without a clear destination in mind. I feel maybe a fraction of what nomads feel when they leave an accustomed corner for the wide unknown. The first time I bought a car in India I had driven out of town without a plan, except a utopian notion of experiencing the unexpected. I had more than my fill of adventure, for the car broke down miles from nowhere (you can’t blame an old jalopy for doing what comes to it naturally). I had to scour a tiny village for someone who knew about a car a little more than me, and sleep in a hut after dining on a bowl of gruel. I remembered the friendliness of strangers better than the Spartan accommodation and indifferent chow. I simply loved being away from the city and the curious sense of being untethered, in touch with whatever was around me.
 
So, it is easy for me to understand why some people love their cars so dearly. It is always at our beck and call, ready to take us to wherever our fancy guides us. We don’t have to wait for a train, plane or bus. We can hop into our chariot at a moment’s notice and get going. Yet it is worth giving the subject a second thought. Every time a friend takes me to a show or a restaurant, as the car winds out of my cul de sac I am amazed at what I see. My neighbor has repainted his house an atrocious mauve; a lawyer friend has had his front lawn eye-catchingly manicured; the school next door has a shiny new wing. How come I didn’t notice these earlier? Because when I drive, I am focused on the street, traffic and pedestrians, and notice little else. The car may take me places, I may see new things. But, while doing so, it induces me to overlook many things; I simply do not observe many a thing worth observing.
 
The euphoric feeling that speed generates, blinds us to the truth that a car is the most underused asset on earth. The world over, people use a car no more than two hours a day. 90 percent of the time a car sits in a garage or on the street gathering dust – and, worse, losing its value. The moment you drive a car out of a dealer’s shop, it becomes a ‘used’ car and loses a third of its value. Tells you what an item of vanity and vagary it is. In any case, for that item people on average cough up $30, 000 – unless you need a larger dose of vanity and spend a million dollars for a Bentley or a Lamborghini.
 
The astounding thing is that the internal combustion engine of a car is the most outdated thing in modern life. Developed when women wore corsets and men sported top hats, and nobody had heard of plastic or silicon, it represents the most inefficient use of energy and an outrageous misuse of the world’s resources. Its tailpipe emissions spew toxins and reduce the life span of thousands in major cities by at least ten years, causing cancer, asthma and lung disorder. Cars and trucks account for over four-fifths of the world’s carbon pollution and trigger the worst threat of climate change. The incessant thirst for gasoline it creates, not only generates perverse political alliances with oil producing countries but triggers environmental havoc with technologies like fractioning. The rising sea level and the draughts and storms global warming generates do damage that, if factored in, would raise the real price of gasoline to $10 a gallon.
 
All this leaves aside the brutal fact of silent slaughter by cars every day – silent because nobody talks about it and the press finds it too common to deem it newsworthy. When terrorists used two planes to kill 3,000 Americans on 9/11, it drew headlines for weeks; but 3,000 Americans die from car accidents every month – more than in wars in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan – and it hardly merits any attention. More startling still, over 3,000 people die every day in the world, with India a major contributor, and we, car lovers, scarcely raise an eyebrow.
 
No surprise that Uber and Lyft are doing good business and Zipcars, temporary-use cars, are gaining ground. I can barely wait for automatic, driver-less cars.
 
Our adoration of private cars has become as old-fashioned as our nostalgia for horse-drawn buggies.

​We are used to seeing screen stars avow eternal love one week and divorce the next week, and follow up with unsavory stories about one another. This is not confined to Hollywood. In big cities and small, in our close circles, the rupture of close relations is a common occurrence. We care for somebody, perhaps deeply, as deeply as we know how, and yet the relationship collapses at some point, leaving odious detritus.
 
The question is: What remains? Of an event that was of such prime importance, what endures in our life?

​I was recently in a club where somebody invited me to play a game of table tennis. He was a very poor player, but, I discovered to my embarrassment, I played even worse. This was a memorable epiphany, because I had played the game for years with a fair degree of skill. I had entered competitions and even received lessons from two world champions, Viktor Barna and Richard Bergmann.
 
Equally discomfiting was the experience when a friendly woman showed me the acoustic guitar she had recently acquired. She showed me a couple of chords she had just learned, and I tried to show her a couple more. I couldn’t. My fingers simply didn’t obey my arrogant will. It was no use reminding myself that I was a guitarist in a band and had performed in events and restaurants.
 
My years of loyal practice did not let me retain my proficiency in playing a guitar or table tennis. I had lost the skill, though fragments of the know-how might have lingered. I asked myself: What had remained?
 
In table tennis, the joy of learning from masters and playing against wizards had faded, but I had learned the heady thrill of competing and, more often than not, coping with the pain of losing. Playing in a band taught me, in a way I could not have imagined, the real meaning of coordination, of doing things with others. Even more, my ears learned the difference, even for a folk song or movie tune, the difference between good music and truly good music.
 
Building a relationship with another person, or even living with him or her, is a much more important affair. When it ends, do we retain anything of value?
 
Recently I attended the graduation ceremony of a young person whose parents I have known for years. The parents, Michael and Abigail. divorced some years back, and Abigail attended with her current husband and Michael came with his new girlfriend. As we sat together after the ceremony, unaccountably I felt a great sadness seeing Abigail and Michael talking to each other, amicably but distantly, like polite neighbors. I remembered the time when they started seeing each other and dreamed of living together and the many years they lived together and had children. Is this all that remains? Courtesy and quiet conversation?
 
I spoke to Michael and Abigail later, independently.
 
Michael isn’t a loquacious person. Eventually he volunteered, “I felt angry and humiliated when she left me. It was no comfort that she wasn’t leaving me for another person. It made it clearer, in fact, that she would have no part of me. But you can’t be angry all the time. It came to me that she had struggled -- and, in fact, had had problems. I was a large part of the problem.
 
“So, four years down the line, when she told me that she was to marry someone, I sincerely wished her well. I had briefly met the person, and he seemed a decent person. I wanted them to find the happiness that had eluded us.”
 
I am more comfortable talking with Abigail, and she was more outspoken.
 
“Michael was a special person for me, for a long number of years. I had a difficult time with him later on, and the marriage became a burden instead of a joy or a support.”
 
She looked at her present husband and added, “I do not regret my decision to leave the marriage. It was the right thing to do. I was not happy, and there was no way I could be happy. No matter. Michael will always be a very special person for me.”
 
I remembered my discussion, some years earlier, with a couple both of whom are well-known practicing psychologists. They had each divorced their spouses after a failed marriage and met and married years later.
 
“We did not know any better then. Our marriages had seemed burdensome, and we decided to end them. Our spouses were decent people, but our relationship had seemed irrecoverable and hopeless. That’s the way the cookie crumbled.
 
“Now, having counselled scores of couples and seen their problems, we feel perhaps our relationships weren’t so ill-fated after all. Probably those marriages could have been saved. One is never sure, but it is possible. We just didn’t know better.”
 
Many leave their partners in acrimony, at least distaste. Fortunate – but sadly few -- are those whose relations end on a reassuring note and they can go their way with something to treasure.
 
We cannot all play guitar or good table tennis all our life, but we can treasure what we have loved and learned.

​“It is not a story of love or hate,” said Michael. “It is rather a story of discovery. Of finding – quite accidentally – what matters, what we must value the most.”
 
Isabella, who sat in the opposite corner, rejoined, “Yes, it is a story of what is the most valuable in life.” She gave a long pause and added, “That is why it is also a story of love.”
 
From my comfortable perch on the sofa, I looked at them both, their faces lit by the shaded lamps near them. I said, “Tell me the story.”

Camino de Santiago is perhaps the world’s most sacred road of pilgrimage. It is really a network of roads, starting in Spain, France and Portugal and ending in Galicia in northwestern Spain, where stands the famous cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. It has the shrine of Saint James, who was beheaded in Jerusalem and his body brought back to Spain for burial.
 
Michael is an electronics executive and, though from a Catholic family, essentially an agnostic. Isabella, from a Catholic family too, is a well-known violinist and occasionally attends a mass. It was more as a touristic lark than out of religious fervor that they agreed they will visit Paris and then make the pilgrimage. Camino Francés is on UNESCO’s World Heritage list and it would be fun, they thought, to experience it.
 
The more they thought about it, as they toured Paris, they grew excited at the prospect of the adventure. They would buy a credencial or pilgrim passport, exactly like a regular pilgrim, that would entitle them to stay in the hostels on the way. They would also purchase two modest haversacks in which they would carry a change of clothes, toiletries and medicines, and rent a car to cover the initial distance from France. Then, once inside Spain, again like a regular pilgrim, walk the last hundred kilometers to the cathedral and shrine.
 
They were not religious. They had never done anything of the kind. But they were fit, and a longish walk would be a refreshing challenge. When they left the car and started their walk, three other pilgrims were doing the same. Two others, who were doing the last 200 km by bicycle – an option they had considered and rejected – waved at them and moved on. The other three pilgrims were slow marchers and Michael and Isabella waved them goodbye and moved ahead.
 
It was springtime, turning toward summer. The air was fresh and pleasant, the sky cloudless. Equally cloudless was their mind. They laughed and talked and walked on. Michael felt on top of the world. He was happy, carefree, eager to embrace the novel experience of a venturesome pilgrim. Isabella too was happy in a way. After a long time, she had Michael to herself, fully, free of his perennial preoccupations with his work and his life, eager to assert his completeness the more, she sensed, he felt incomplete in some way.
 
They did the route amazingly easily. Michael credited it to his daily jog and her daily chores around the home. Then it happened. They were barely 18 km short of the cathedral when Michael suddenly said he wasn’t feeling well and, before Isabelle could ask anything, he almost collapsed. Isabelle held him and gently laid him down on the grass beside the road.
 
Michael lay on his back, still, breathing slowly. He lay for a long time, while Isabelle waited anxiously. Then his breathing became more normal. He asked for water. Isabelle offered the small cup that came with her water flask. Michael drank. Then he whispered, “I can’t do it without you.”
 
Isabelle was stunned. In seven years of marriage, she had never heard that. What did he mean? Did he mean just this walk, or their life together? Michael was always so self-sufficient. She felt herself an addendum, useful and ornamental, but never essential or even crucial. She held him.
 
Minutes later, when four other pilgrims came up, they helped Isabelle and they were able to transport Michael to the nearest hostel. When Isabelle bent over him two hours later to say goodnight, Michael looked at her face for a long time and said, “You are everything to me.” This, too, she had never heard before.
 
Amazingly, Michael felt much better the next morning and insisted on walking the rest of the way to complete the pilgrimage. They did. Then, on Isabelle’s insistence, Michael had himself examined at the adjacent hospital, which, he noted cheerfully, carried Queen Isabella’s name.
 
Michael told me, “When I came home, I had a thorough examination, head to foot. Strangely, they found nothing wrong with me. But I had found something terribly wrong with me. I realized my whole life was wrong. I did not relate to the person nearest to me, my wife. Maybe I did not relate to anybody. I decided to change. Rather, I decided I wanted to regain my life.”
 
Isabelle said, “That strange, inexplicable problem on the road changed everything for us. We seemed to have regained the life we wanted but did not have. I felt I had a new husband – and a new relationship.”
 
Michael smiled and added, “I am no believer. But that road, Camino de Santiago, became a sacred road for me. Our trip turned out to be a pilgrimage after all.”

Here I am, on the eleventh floor of a downtown building, looking out on the city from an outsize window extending from wall to wall. It is a sunny day, and I have a panoramic view of Bogotá, packed by homes and offices and fringed by green-gray mountains. One day I will amble past those homes and offices and walk up to the mountains.
 
I am in this town for the past three weeks. I speak Spanish and the Latin culture intrigues me. I know a few people, but generally I am on my own. I walk the streets, I haunt the museums, I sip divine coffee in the innumerable bakeries and consume endless croissants. Here it is never too warm or too cold. A light parka is enough to keep me comfortable when I emerge late from a nightclub.

I am amazed at how much our lives change when we move from one country to another. I am the same person whether in Washington or anywhere else, very much a creature of habit. Why should my life change at all, except very peripherally? Yet I find that my routine has changed dramatically. I am eating differently, spending my time differently, even thinking differently. Convenience may have something to do with this, but surely my habits and inclinations would work in the opposite direction and keep me in my place. Instead, I notice in me a seismic shift, in the way I react to people and things.   
 
I get up in the morning and cross the street into a tiny coffee shop and order for breakfast a bowl of changua, a bread-and-egg soup, or arepas, ground maize patties with cheese and avocado, followed by a chocolate drink. These are nowhere near what I eat in Washington. In taste and texture, they are very different, but I eat them contentedly. When the young woman with tousled hair who serves the drink misses a step and spills a drop or two on my jeans, I am unconcerned and gladly tip her more than she expected.
 
When I walk, I look at every shop and every passerby. Everything seems to have a strange aura of newness. The new faces of men and women strike me with a curious piquancy. Many look preoccupied, some look sad or indifferent, but many look upbeat and happy. They jolt me into remembering that there are quite a few things in my life to make me very cheery. Even when they carelessly jostle me, it fazes me no more than the lightest drizzle, and I walk on. Here sometimes it drizzles without notice, suddenly while the sun is at its dazzling best, and I am content to walk and let my jacket gather the moisture.
 
I know an accomplished dressmaker and I playfully ordered a bunch of shirts, of a special design that had caught my fancy. I cannot even remember when I last had a shirt made to order, but the person seemed cordial and the price more than reasonable. Now that the shirts have come, I wear them with the enthusiasm only a naïve adolescent should feel. I honestly don’t think I felt a kindred thrill when I bought a new Mercedes Benz.
 
What is this special feeling I have? Is it just the fun of experiencing the newness of my world, the sharp taste of unaccustomed sights and sounds? Is it the hope of some kind of a new beginning, which is always full of promise? Is it just my body responding to the freshness of a new land, new lodging, new air? I could disregard it as the naive enthusiasm of a casual visitor to a new country. Then it occurred to me how little is the newness of my new environment. This apartment, charming as it is, is not so very different from all the apartments I have lived in. The food, intriguingly different as it is, is not all that different from the exotic foods that I have variously probed. The leisure, the ease, the company, valuable as they are, are not a category apart from the time and pleasure I have had with others at other times.
 
What is new is the time I have given myself to taste the newness. The freedom I have suddenly assigned myself to look at things, to listen to people, even to taste what I eat without rushing to judgment and asking myself how they really are. Perhaps unknowingly, but wisely – with the wisdom born of a thousand regrets and disillusionments – I have freed myself to experience the beauty that lies both hidden and open around us.
 
When I woke up this morning and rolled up the window screen, the sun was just coming up. My disorderly room filled instantly with a gentle light. There seemed a kindly promise foreordained in the quiet unveiling of the day. No great event is planned for the day, no plan for a mountain tour or a great outing with a special person, not even a candlelight dinner to look forward to. Still, I felt a strange pleasure as I stood in the shower, smelled the towel and put on my new shirt. The world has something to offer me and I have something to receive.

​Some say it is not a good time for older people.
 
It was perhaps never a good time for older people. You sense daily your waning strength; you cannot do now what you did, often easily, at other times. You cannot lift a packed suitcase or walk up four flights of stairs. Even to unscrew a tamper-proof medicine bottle you have to swallow your pride and beg the nearest youngster.
 
The humiliation does not stop there. Even your mind plays tricks with you. Forget about reciting the poem that you knew so well. You might start well, but experience has taught you that you will invariably stumble and forget some key lines. Invariably and embarrassingly, you forget the name of your nephew’s tall wife, the one who wears a shiny nose-pin. Sometimes even the nephew’s name eludes you.

​Yes, you have already lived ten years more than your father did, and, Heaven knows, you are in good enough shape to last another ten. Especially if you continue to gobble the eighteen tablets the doctor wants you to take. It isn’t such an enticing prospect when you remember that your urologist has warned of approaching incontinence and your dentist has twice talked of a couple of costly implants.
 
That cost business has real terror. You worked all your life, for what you thought was a decent wage. Nobody told you that what you earned and laid by would amount to a pittance in a few years. Your children laugh when they hear of your piddling accounts and what your life insurance policy is worth now. Once you pay the rental – for the same-size puny apartment you now pay three times what you started paying – you can barely cover your food bill and the occasional taxi fare.
 
You walk carefully, for you know that if you were to slip and fall, you have to turn to your children for what medical bills cost now. They are kind and helpful, but kindness can be tiresome after a while and you don’t care to be a help-seeking supplicant any time. You love your children, and you appreciate them. But you know well they belong to a different generation, with very different priorities. Looking after an aging parent occurs somewhere on their to-do list, but surely not at the top. You understand. Competition is fierce and demands on their time intense.
 
Also, they speak a different language, almost as if they belong to another world. You have tried, occasionally, tentatively, to hint at the void you sometimes feel and you have realized quickly that you were coming up against a wall. They would like to be of help, but they have no time. You would have liked them to explain an item in the newspaper that caught your attention or to help with a problem on your computer, but they rarely have the time to spare. They may quickly say a few things, but you may not understand, and you would prefer to give up than seem to be badgering them.
 
Essentially, you are on your own. One of your wisecracking friends used to say, “Aging is not nice, but the alternative is no better.” Yes, you are mercifully alive, which many of your friends are not. So many, your closest friends, have moved on; those that remain are often unwell, not quite mobile, or inaccessible to sensible conversation. It is good to survive, but not so good when the people you knew or cared for have not. There are few to talk to and nobody to talk with.
 
You don’t look at the mirror as often as you did earlier, but when you do you have to reckon with the aged face you see: a lined visage, an old scar or two, graying temples, hooded eyes. You are not the robust man you looked in yesteryears. You try to stride, without a stoop, and manage to achieve a relaxed but respectable gait. Yes, whatever the thoughts that gnaw at you, you are still quite a person, of poise and polish.
 
You don’t feel old at all. Strangely, you sense the person you have always believed yourself to be, sitting right there within you, watching, understanding, growing quietly. And as steadily as when you sat at a school desk and learned mathematics, or stood in a college hall and listened to a student politician. Or labored at your office desk in the beige hall and answered endless service calls.
 
No, you are not old. The years may have furrowed your face, sapped your energy, dimmed your eyes, enlarged your prostate, or robbed the value of your savings. You are alive, you are active, you have the grip of your world, you are taking in everything that is happening around you, you are making sense of the universe. You are a full human being, worthy and valuable, at par with the rest of humanity, titled for respect.
 
Didn’t somebody say that “an old man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick,” only to remember to add, “unless soul clap its hands and sing – and louder sing – for every tatter in its mortal dress.”

​Sing, for Heaven’s sake, and sing the loudest you can.

It is never easy to lose someone in your life.
 
We all know how painful it is when, through a misunderstanding or an inadvertent hurt, there is the end of a friendship, maybe a close relationship. We may angrily say, “I am well rid of such a person,” but the pain of rupture is real. Every person we lose is a significant subtraction from our life.
 
If I care for a person, his or her departure from my life is a real loss. Every person is unique and so the void is never filled. On a quiet Sunday morning, as you sip your tea, the memory suddenly returns like the sudden prick of a pin. As you listen to a song, an unexpected pang overwhelms you with a pain you thought you had put firmly behind you.

​Through this agony, who knows, there possibly runs a thin filament of hope. You hope that, one day, in some mysterious way, there will be, if not a reconciliation, at least a rapprochement. The other person will see that you meant well and cared deeply and will turn around with a penitent heart. You will then once again see a well-loved face, clasp an extended hand, hug a tender body. All the accumulated hurt will melt in a golden moment.
 
But what happens when the loss is definitive, and the door has been shut with finality? When death comes and ends a relationship, there is not even a meager hope. You know that you have lost something precious forever. There is only desolation, the sense of an unfinished story, and the despair of utter hopelessness.
 
I have now come to a country where for years there was an unending spate of violence. In Colombia, the extensive killing has ended, but there are not many families that have not lost a beloved member. A family I have known from Washington, whose hospitality I have enjoyed in Bogota, is one such family.
 
Matías was only twenty-one, a fresh graduate, a lanky young man with a broad smile and a loping gait. He was highly social, knew everybody in the neighborhood, and was eager to lend a hand, whether to get a medicine or fix a bicycle. Kind and jovial, he had access to every house in the neighborhood and friendship with every young man or woman.
 
That social link may have been his undoing. The stories of those violent days are seldom clear, and that of Matías is no exception. Nobody knows what happened; there is only speculation. He may have unwittingly come to know of some drug deal. He may have overheard some planned shenanigan, even the killing of a key official. He may even have been offered a part in some shady operation and his refusal may have sealed his fate. Those were not days when terminating a life, even a young, innocent life, was a big deal for cartel leaders.
 
Matías did not come home one evening. A night of frantic calling and checking, and of agonized search in many homes. At the crack of dawn, some villager reported a mutilated body on the town’s outskirt. Matías had been shot in the head and his body had simply been left on the street as a warning to those who doubted the omnipotence of drug dealers.
 
Matías’s mother, Mariana, is my friend and she has talked about her lost son several times. It hurts her to talk about it, and even twelve years later it brings tears to her eyes. But she cannot but talk about it. It is still a living reality for her. A very living reality.
 
How can you not miss somebody you gave birth to, saw growing up, day by day, month by month? You held him, you fed him, you clothed him, you gave him life -- that became an inseparable part of your own life. How do you live after that very important part of your life is snatched away? I don’t know. I shudder to think of the enormity of pain that suffuses every fiber of our body when such a loss occurs. And to think that somebody, for some indecipherable reason, deliberately causes that inhuman loss.
 
I listen to Mariana. I see the photos she shows me. I hear the painful history and its painful aftermath. She cannot help it and I cannot but hear my friend’s story. I wonder how does one live after that and live a normal daily life. How does one walk, read, cook, shower, eat, talk, do the simplest things of life? How does one sleep at all?
 
Yet Mariana lives and does all these things. She even laughs when I say a joke and holds my hand when I give her some insignificant gift. She says she does not know how she came out of the nightmare of the days that followed the horrific discovery. I suppose nobody knows or understands how one survives such mortifying pain.
 
I only know now, with a poignancy that I never knew before, that people live with such excruciating loss. They live from hour to hour, day to day, putting one step before another, doing the daily chores, while at all times nursing at their heart a wound that never stops bleeding.
 
You and I, exempt from such loss, – but only for a few months or some years, for our turn has to come, to lose what we value – can only sit quietly and listen. And try, earnestly, to understand what is surely beyond all understanding.

​He had a gaunt face with deep-set eyes. Balancing his severe face was his rare but radiant smile, friendly and accepting. We liked him. I loved him.

​​The year was 1942 and the Japanese had started bombing Kolkata, trying to destroy the port and Howrah Bridge. Father had to stay in Kolkata for his work, but he suggested that Mother leave town for a while. Mother went, with two small children, to Bihar where she had brothers,.
 
When Father went to a doctor for tennis elbow, he encountered another patient in acute pain. Solomon, an American army officer, had cirrhosis of liver from regular drinking and was advised to stop hitting the bottle and live on a limited diet. In the absence of his family, Father had plenty of space in his apartment. He took pity on the man and offered to lodge the ailing American. He instructed the cook to serve Solomon only boiled, easily digestible food.

When Mother returned after eight months, two young children in tow, Solomon offered to leave, but Mother noticed his pale face, heard of his delicate condition and urged him to stay. Solomon had paid limited heed to the doctor’s embargo of his drinking habit so far. Mother now laid down the law gently but firmly. No booze, none. She served him bland, boiled vegetables along with lean meat and fish and his health improved. 
 
Years later, we pieced together the truth that Solomon was no ordinary soldier. He worked for the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor of the CIA, and was in India essentially to monitor the British defense preparedness on the eastern front. He was posted to Kolkata but would disappear periodically to survey the situation first-hand at the Burmese frontier. The allied powers were concerned about Japanese incursion and wanted to ascertain the real situation, independently of British assurances, and wanted a US agent to monitor the position.
 
My parents knew nothing of this and took Solomon as a pleasant foreigner in ill health whom they liked and wanted to help. Solomon was a tall, lean man who spoke softly and smiled shyly. His brown hair was brushed back but always looked slightly untidy. He was a good tennis player, for I saw him beat father easily. He also played soccer with me, I suspect mainly to please me. He was a poor soccer player – he had never learned or played it before – and I enjoyed outwitting him in the field. Looking back, I marvel that he agreed graciously to play with me a game that he did not know and possibly did not enjoy. He played enthusiastically, ran energetically and cheered when I scored against him. In sheer sportsmanship, he had no equal.
 
In the evenings, he read, wrote letters and chatted with my parents and their friends. He was a quiet man, but by his smile and gentle, attentive presence gave a sense of participation. With us kids, he was perfectly at home, ready to talk and help. Father wanted me to call him uncle, and nobody could be more avuncular that this lanky man with a ready smile.
 
Solomon worked in the Fort William and would bring along all kinds of stuff from the American Commissary: powdered milk that tasted better than the milk we were used to, powder egg that let mother make deliciously soft and fluffy omelets, huge cans of pears, oranges and apples immersed in some light sauce that added to their taste, and large tins of cookies and chocolates that Father struggled to keep away from my hands.
 
He brought something else from the Commissary that made a great difference to my life. He brought home large cartons of pocketbooks, and I became probably the only schoolboy in Kolkata who had a massive collection of English literature, from Shakespeare to Salinger. He also gifted me a remarkable series of books, produced for the US Army, on English language and style. My entire school education was in my first language, Bengali, and those ingenious books, designed for low-level privates, changed my savor of the English language.
 
Mother’s diet had improved Solomon’s health, but his liver, long battered by his copious drinking, finally gave way. One morning he did not drink his coffee, and when mother made him some soup, he could barely take a spoonful. He was in great pain and father quickly summoned our family doctor. It was no use. Solomon died in the afternoon in Mother’s arms. Officials came from the Fort William to retrieve his body and probably forward it to his family in the US after embalming.
 
Solomon’s was a short, accidental presence in our life, but the guest room he occupied had turned into a cordial corner for me. His gentle presence, soft voice and unfamiliar cologne had become a lovable, reassuring part of my day. Like my brother and my parents, he was now an affectionate certainty in my life. Then, like a thunderclap, came the warm, overcast day when three burly men came and, silently, took Soloman away in a khaki body bag.
 
We had lost an unusual member of our family.