Mr. Blanchard might be the happiest blind man alive. He is certainly the happiest man I know.
 
He is in his late eighties, I estimate. He sits ramrod straight. He walks with a cane, but still erect. A white-haired man who projects an air of self-assurance. He is always well shaved and nattily dressed, as if he is going for a date. Once, when I tell him this, he laughs and says, “Indeed I have a date. I have a date with the world.”
 
For me, he is a surprise. And I have told him why.
 
When I was a young boy in Kolkata, I used to see every morning a youth guiding an old man across the street and seating him on the curb near a market corner. Next to him was placed a metal bowl where passers-by dropped a coin or two. The old man would sit there until dusk, hoping for alms, and occasionally muttering a plea for pedestrians. I couldn’t hear him, but I knew it was an abject plea, asking for pity and help from people who passed. Most ignored him, treating him as an easily disregarded apparition, but a few gave him small change. That was my first experience with a blind person.
 
When I grew up and went to work in a large factory, I met a blind man who worked close to me in the cycle tire shop. At the start of the shift, a young woman would bring him to the factory workplace and seat him down next to the machine where he worked and hand him the small packet that contained his lunch. It was considered very progressive of the company to have hired a blind man and made a minor adjustment to the supply line so that he could work there safely. I got to speak with him and he told me he had lost his eyes in an accident in the small car repair shop he had worked earlier without protective goggles. He felt grateful that the tire factory had hired him and paid him a decent wage. He was neatly dressed, very polite, agreeable to talk to, and fully reconciled to his present life. I found him a decent man but at the back of my mind was a murmur of discomfort. An educated man, doing a humdrum, repetitive job for seven years and set to do it seven years more perhaps, solely to earn a living. It seemed less than ideal. He might have been content, but I could not imagine him happy.
 
Mr. Blanchard, whom I met in my Washington apartment building, is a stunning contrast. He is neither pitiable nor content. He is a vibrant man, seemingly set to live a significant and happy life. I met him when my life was a bit of a mess; to talk to him, I felt, was a lesson in how to live such a radiant life.

​As a young person, he had joined a public relations firm and worked in its advertising group as a copywriter. His interest changed over time and he started doing the graphic work for the copies. He ended up as the principal graphic artist of the company. He was a successful executive for nearly two decades when he started having problems with his sight. He experienced no pain or irritation in his eyes but found his vision begin to dim after a few hours of work.
 
First two eye doctors and then a famous specialist. The specialist read the reports, examined him for a long time and then, gently but firmly, dropped the hammer.
 
“I was to lose my sight,” explains Mr. Blanchard. “Something to do with my nerves. There was no remedy. I had four months, at most six, of quickly declining vision. Nothing after that.
 
“It was like a thunderclap. I could only think of my future days with anxiety and fear. I could not think straight. It was a week of sheer agony. Perhaps it was that which brought a slow measure of clarity. I was to lose vision, not my life. I did not want to forfeit my whole life because I couldn’t see any more.
 
“I set myself to learn braille. I took advice and filled my home with equipment that helps sightless people, speakers and scanners and sound recorders. I bought a more powerful computer and added the right software. I subscribed to audio programs and records.
 
“I also joined a group, of people who had lost vision fairly recently. I heard their stories and drew support from their survival stories. Hearing them, I had the idea of going back to copywriting. I had the advantage that I could visualize the graphics and provide sketches of the design that could go with the copy. I created a new part-time career.
 
Mr. Blanchard laughs and adds, “It was the last thing I did that turned out to be the most sustaining. If I had only a few more months to see, I wanted to see the most – the things I most cared for and with the most care. I got up early to see the sun rise and watched the sunset the way I had never done before. The park in the corner I reconnoitered as if it was to disappear the next day. My apartment I looked at every nook and cranny. My son and his children, every friend, I peered at their faces as if my life depended on it.”
 
He laughs again, “Indeed my life now relies on the most wonderful set of memories. I can clearly see the things I loved and wanted to see. I took the trouble to hold on to the sights and sounds and memories that other let go by. Perhaps a little too carelessly.”
 
I look at his gentle, smiling face, and sit wondering. Then I hear these astounding words, “You think I don’t have a picture of you. I have met you recently, but we have spoken from the heart. And, my friend, I have a most beautiful picture of you.”

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 entirely been 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.

It was the strangest Christmas of my life. I have celebrated Christmas in strange circumstances in strange places, eaten strange delicacies and participated in strange rituals. But, in sheer strangeness, the Christmas this year – to use a metaphor tailored for the yuletide season – takes the cake.
 
In Nagpur, where I passed my earliest years, we lived in a duplex apartment next to a conservative Brahmin family averse to all foreign rituals. Christmas had to be observed discreetly, without any fanfare, lights and music to boot. We ate a special meal to be sure, but cooked without onions or garlic whose odious odor could not waft beyond our walls. However, their two children, my friends, ambled over in the evening for a surreptitious bite of our Christmas cake.

​In Kolkata, where we moved shortly, Christmas was a jollier affair. Not only did Father bring delicacies from Nahoum’s famous bakery in the New Market, but Mother also bought buns and pastries from Hamid Bhai who came to our home with a large tin box stuffed with baked wonders. Our festive meal might have started as the standard east Indian fare, but soon Father’s western colleagues helped add to our holiday meals with exotic British, American and Australian dishes. Later they became even more varied when Mother started trying her hand at unusual dishes under the tutelage of her Sindhi, Tamil and Burmese friends.
 
When I started working for a European company, then led by British executives, the Christmas dinner became a rather formal affair, usually in the private sanctum of an elite restaurant, consisting of an English-style dinner with several Asian variations. I am not sure I retained a sound culinary judgment after three Whisky Sour, but I remember being quite partial to the smoked Hilsa, an outrageously odd but delicious choice.
 
When I married, my wife, though American, brought along her Scandinavian legacy, modified by a French education and Asian work experience. She cared less for a formal dinner than an informal Open House for Christmas when friends could come and go flexibly and enjoy finger food with drinks. She would personally cook for weeks and serve a huge assortment of hors d’oeuvres from different continents. The food was so varied and so unusual that she had to label each item with its name and ingredients. Adventurous guests could taste whatever they felt bold enough to try.
 
My work entailed not just travel but living overseas for extended periods. One Christmas I found myself in Oman and a friend graciously invited me for dinner. The air was cool but present, and he decided to barbecue. The meat was tender and had a special flavor. When asked about it, he urged me to recall the Christmas story of the three gifts the magi reportedly took for the newborn. I struggled to remember: gold, frankincense and – “myrrh,” he helped. I never knew what it was. Now I knew it was a prized additive that added a special flavor to meat and was valued in the Middle East.
 
Christmas was also a pleasant memory in the United Arab Emirates, though the leaders took pains to emphasize that they celebrated the event but separated it carefully from its religious association. They moved the local church from the main road to a nondescript street, and yet recognized that Christmas had become a major international event, even a marketing occasion, few trading countries could ignore. I loved the special Christmas meals the Emiratis served, including the spiced Shwarma and coffee with cardamom after a super-sugary plum cake.
 
I have been in Paris and London during the Christmas season, but Haiti, in its unusual way, offered its unique brand of the Noel season. There were lights of course, but with them were the unusual metal sculptures made out of beaten storage cans, gaunt elves and rotund deer. We partied to the wee hours and, when hungry, ate rice and beans with pumpkin soup and griyo made of fried pork. Through the night we drank superb Barbancour rum and danced to the throbbing beat of meringue and the creole konpa.
 
All of these seemed a fuzzy dream this year as I passed a somnolent Christmas in my home. Washington erupts as a party town at the end of the year as the denizens bury their ideological battles in ‘spirited’ celebration and companies exhaust their entertainment budgets in lavish dinner-and-dance parties. Not this year.
 
No party on Christmas Eve. No champagne and canapés. No bands, no dances. We put on masks not as a part of a fancy dress, but to avoid toxic germs. We didn’t hug or kiss; we kept social distance. In fact, most of us just stayed home. A few half-heartedly put on some lights, possibly to remind themselves that the holiday season had arrived. I stayed home, all by myself, sternly advised to quarantine myself from all festive creatures. I poured myself a friend’s gift of some excellent Prosecco, looked out of the window and saw the floating little flecks of snow. Christmas had indeed arrived, with no fanfare, with only a white finger gently writing on the grass an inscrutable message of goodwill and, hopefully, love.

“You went to that gorgeous party, with all those celebrities, and you don’t have a single picture,” expostulated my neighbor, Mrs. Gillibrand, an inexhaustible fount of curiosity about all that ever goes on in our community. Her exasperation was writ large on her knitted brow.
 
Everybody is a photographer today. Practically everybody owns a smartphone, even kids from affluent families, and there is no smartphone worth the name that can’t take pictures. They are improving fast too, and many are developing sophisticated features to help the picture-taker.
 
Alongside is developing the expectation that people ought to record all that is happening around them. My neighbor is no exception. If I attend a wedding, I am expected to be able to show shots of the couple, famous guests, a dancing crowd, the ceremony, even the wedding cake. If I attend a funeral, I must attest to my presence by shooting, if not the deceased, the grieving widow, moaning family and collapsing friends.
 
No amount of recycling can solve the problem of the huge amount of trash we create in the world, besides what we dump in lakes and oceans. Do we really need more? Any Facebook and Instagram enthusiast, not to mention the TikTok and SnapChat aficionado, who attends any event of consequence – which apparently includes the last pie that emerged from her oven or the first hamburger that went into his maw – must document it abundantly, gratuitously and “to the last syllable of recorded time.” Where one shot of a smiling face would suffice, we are supplied a dozen.
 
If surfeit weren’t enough to bother, the abysmal quality of the photos distracts. The vast army of new-born photographers have no concern with ‘exposure value’ and haven’t possibly heard of ‘depth of field.’ They happily defy the rules of framing and composition. They press a button and publish the eyesore results. The surprising thing is that they don’t seem to notice the difference between beauty and blight. Why don’t they ever edit their insufferable output? Every phone has an app to crop the photo, change the lighting, increase the sharpness and improve the contrast. The avid shutterbugs never seem to bother using it. Granted that not all photographers need to reach a professional standard; one expects though they would not take leave of their eyes and eliminate the clearly hideous ones.
 
Since digital cameras make it easy and inexpensive to take photos, I have a simple rule. I promptly delete eighty percent of the photos I take; of the rest, I heavily edit at least one-half.

​These thoughts came to me with some force when I accidentally opened an envelope last night and came across some old photos. These are mostly pictures of friends and family, especially of my children when they were young. They were simple pictures, meant only for private use and not for a gallery, but what joy it was to see them again! Because they were simple photos, but lovingly composed and thoughtfully edited, each of them told a story and lifted my heart.
 
What beautiful things photos can be! When good cameras costly and bulky objects and photos were expensive to print, we seemed to take some minimal care in taking pictures of people and things. When new technology removed the need for an exposure meter and gave us a huge latitude in light-sensitivity, we forgot to pay attention to the light; now most people let their cameras decide the exposure for them. When further technology gave our cameras the capability to calculate the focus, we forgot the whole business of focus and never learned that focus too, like light, is a matter of judgment. Yes, technology has made photography easier if your goal is to consistently produce mediocre stuff. Good photos still require a modicum of effort: some learning and a touch of skill.
 
And then, in a flash, came to me the real difference between then and now. Then we took fewer pictures with greater care. Now we take tons and tons of pictures, with scant concern about the process and no care. We have replaced scarcity with plenty, which may seem a good thing, but we have also replaced attention with indifference, an eye for quality with a taste for crudity, a preference for vulgar abundance over discriminate choice.
 
I look at my home and realize the huge profusion of things that I have not used in a long while and probably never will. Whether it is shoes or clothes or razors, I have many more than my father or grandfather could have dreamed of. Does it add to the quality of my life any more than it could have enriched my forefathers’? I have strong doubts. I have trouble finding what I need, I waste time making choices that hardly make me happier or my life more worthwhile.
 
More is not necessarily better, though people dogged by memories of scarcity are liable to be tempted by it. More pictures might have pleased my curious neighbor, Mrs. Gillibrand, but they would have added little to the world.

​Most of us don’t notice a momentous change until it is inches from us and shakes us by our shoulders. Economists typically have a pompous name for it; they call it “lagged adjustment.” We see the change coming through a corner of the eye and ignore it, until it gets close enough to upset our life and force us to tweak something.
 
Lots of people still whip out their Montblanc and write paper checks to settle their bills, no matter that their clients, creditors, banks and financial advisors would like them to do it cheaply, quickly, sensibly – electronically. Lots of them too march into their favorite stores and pick up their choice of shirt or shoes, bread or book, razor or refrigerator, no matter that they can have a wider selection and better prices if they bought these online.
 
It has taken us quite a bit of time to give up using paper maps and turn to MapQuest or Google Map for road directions. It helps that few shops have paper maps to sell. Stationary phones still adorn some living rooms, but mostly as a memento since few people now transact much except on their mobile phones. It helps the switch that one can’t receive photos, music or instant text on the landline. We hardly run to our television at a fixed hour to hear the news or watch a movie, for news is accessible any time and movies are on demand.
 
But a bigger change is coming down the pike.
 
I remember the thrill when I first bought a car, though it was little better than a jalopy. A little of that thrill returned when I later bought a brand-new car and even later when I splurged on a luxury sedan. Vestiges of it haven’t survived the dubious joy of navigating city traffic. I am impressed when I see others lovingly polish their cars. I seldom clean my car; when it gets dusty, I leave it in the rain.
 
I know many others are not like me. Faulkner said that Americans love their cars more than their wives and children. Some show exceptional attachment to their vehicles. They extol its virtues and run down rival models. They nurse it in a well-appointed garage and haul it to mechanics for regular check-ups. Like a favored pet, they take it periodically to a specialty shop for a beauty treatment.
 
There is sad news for them. The car as a precious private possession is dead as the dodo. The pandemic has delayed its departure, but its fate is sealed.
 
In the Chinese metropolis, Shenzhen, you can already have the driverless car service called AutoX – I find the name prophetic when I read it as AutoEx. You will soon have the same service in the more complex city of Beijing, when Baidu, the Chinese search giant, launches its robo-taxis after successful runs in Changzhou and Changsha.
 
Americans can have the same no-driver ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Arizona, in the area now called Waymo One, where Google’s parent company Alphabet is trying out its driverless fleet. General Motors, the car giant, won’t be left behind and has acquired two technology companies that will equip all its cars with sensors and help launch the electric car Bolt as a driverless taxi. Amazon, not content with delivering dishes and dresses to our doors, is getting to bring out the fully-autonomous, electric, four-seater, cutely called Zoox.

​Mercedes Benz, the elite brand, is working with technology pioneer Nvidia’s supercomputers to design autonomous cars from the ground up and incorporate emerging AI. Other car companies, Toyota, Tesla, Renault, Nissan, Volvo, Audi and Peugeot Citroen are all hopping on the bandwagon and investing huge sums to launch self-driving cars.
 
Meanwhile, big technology groups such as Intel, Luminar and Velodyne have also jumped into the fray. A robotic car needs cameras to guide its path and avoid other objects, but it also needs Lidar technology – light detection and ranging – that uses laser light pulses to measure distance and ‘see’ surroundings. Also, it will need computer prowess to digest a vast amount of data on the road surely and speedily. Numberless billions have already been invested. While Covid19 slowed progress for a while, it also underlined the urgency of a car without an unknown driver.
 
Two truths define the inescapable logic of autonomous cars. A million and a half people die every year from car accidents and 94 percent of these are from human error. We have the technology to do far better than that. The second reality is that a car is the most underutilized asset in the world, used on an average of two hours a day.
 
Except for the over-rich, who have too much money and want to waste it, and the under-informed, who don’t know and don’t want to know better, there will soon be no reason for anyone to own a car. You can soon go anywhere you want with a car that will obey you and take you there safely and swiftly – and not hold up your capital and occupy useless space in your garage.
 
The private car is a goner. But who cares if you can neck with your dear friend on a long, cozy taxi ride, in a self-driving car that has no driver to peer and frown!

​I met Helen thirty years ago when she was visiting Washington from Riyadh where she worked. Her daughter, Thea, a government attorney, and I had worked together in Haiti some years back and she had correctly guessed that I would love to meet her mother, an outlier from all accounts. Though Helen was in town for a short stay, Thea had arranged for us to have lunch together and a leisurely conversation.
 
Conversation with Helen was invariably a lively affair. She had unconventional views and she expressed them unreservedly. Fond as I am of Thea, she seemed to recede instantly into the background as Helen took the stage. She was of medium height and spoke softly, but appeared tall and commanding as she sat on the other side of the table. I had chosen the restaurant from its past reputation, but, as happens often in Washington, it had lapsed from its past elegance and I felt embarrassed about my choice; I offered to move elsewhere. Helen wouldn’t hear of it and said she was perfectly happy where we were.
 
She was ebullient and none the worse for her long flight from Saudi Arabia. She wore a bright floral dress and seemed radiant and eager to talk. We had a lot to talk about, for coincidentally we had both spent years in andragogy, the way adults learn, especially in a work situation. I am skeptical of the way many organizations try to stuff information into learners in the name of training or education. It was delightful to find that Helen too was interested in new, unconventional approaches to teaching.
 
Our rapport rose a notch higher when we found our common interest in innovation in language learning. I told her of my explorations in novel language acquisition techniques and she responded by telling me the methods she was trying with Arab professionals. It became for me quite a memorable lunch.
 
Helen’s unconventionality was not just in learning issues. She was one of few persons I know who genuinely cared about immigrants and had a broad, informed view of how a liberal immigration policy helps richer countries. I had worked with Haitian, Tibetan and Bhutanese refugees and was perturbed by the prejudices I encountered often among educated Americans. It was a surprise to hear Helen’s ideas: they were practical and respectful, and far ahead of those of my diplomatic colleagues.
 
She had first worked with Vietnamese refugees, developing new ways to teach them English and prepare them for a new society. Later she became Idaho state’s refugee coordinator and her supreme ambition was to give uprooted people both capacity and dignity quickly. She believed focused learning was the clue. She brought together diverse teaching institutions for the purpose, eventually creating an International Institute that resettled thousands of refugees and gave them a worthy life.
 
That was her metier. She conceived new and unusual ideas and then she fought to given them practical shape. I saw this at close range when Helen decided to return to the US and stay in the Washington area. It was incredible the way she approached her role as grandmother to Thea’s son, her grandson. She acted more like another child, in the way she reacted to her grandson’s ideas, with instant insight, understanding and enthusiasm. She bought huge rolls of paper and quantities of color and let him splash the colors, with hands, legs or his whole body, on large sheets and create his unique self-designed paintings. I would sit and watch her answer his questions, encourage his effort and supply him more colors if he wanted, but never once try to direct or instruct him. That is what teaching meant to her: to assist and inspire, not impart or control.
 
Perhaps some of it was grandmotherly indulgence. But a huge part of it was her belief about what education was all about. It was not to stuff the pupil with the teacher’s ideas or values – paradoxically, which is often what the alumni recall with perverse admiration – but to help the pupil develop his or her own ideas and values from a scratch. It was of a piece with her notion of how a country ought to treat its immigrants and refugees. Not as unfortunate sub-par people who have to be brought up to par with the infusion of information and goals, but precious humans, to be fortified with resources and independence to bring out the best in them.
 
Helen lived by herself, in her own way, and died of coronavirus. She died alone, for she was not allowed visitors, not even her daughters and grandchildren. I tried talking to her; it did not proceed beyond pleasantries. I missed her pulsating presence. More than anybody I know, she had respect for people, even people society deemed less, and cared passionately about their opportunity to live and grow. She was irreplaceable.
 
I can represent her vibrant persona only rather poorly. I will miss her greatly.

I had quite forgotten how beautiful winter can be.
 
Come December, I always dig out the air tickets for India, my land of birth, whose warmth and humidity take some stoicism to bear at other times. If India happens at the time to be indulging its seasonal sport of lynching Muslims or teargassing Kashmiris, I might stray to some equable climate in Mexico City or Manizales.
 
2020 was different. The unusual year of a pandemic created the unwelcome prospect that, should I survive the confined space of an aircraft, supposedly ideal for contagion, wherever I land I could be coyly asked to enter a quarantine for thirty days. A quarantine – thank Heavens, most authorities don’t know that the word means forty days – in a sanitized hotel is not my idea of amusement.
 
Prudently and prosaically, I chose to pass my days in the company of the one person I know to be free of toxic viruses or murderous intentions, myself. I will, I decided, pass my winter days by myself, with the aid of written letters, spoken words and lighted screens. If I needed added salve, I would seek comfort from a redoubtable couple, Tequila and Tom Collins.
 
Then came the snow.

The mercury had been sinking the last several days. Evenings were below the freezing point, nights were deeper in the nether region. Monday it rained, unexpectedly and unseasonably. I had gone out for a walk around the lake nearby, negligent of the weather forecast, and returned with wet shoes and frosted glasses. The weather turned even cooler. Tuesday it snowed.
 
I got up, made what American cookbooks call a French Omelet (though Gaullic friends have the gall to tell me that no Frenchman ever eats that stuff) and stood at the window with a cup of coffee in hand. The tiniest flakes of snow were floating down absentmindedly. They seemed to hover in the air uncertainly before choosing to land in my front yard. They melted slowly once they hit the ground. The earth wasn’t yet cold enough to receive them appropriately,
Slowly the flakes became plumper, came down directly and landed with a visible splat. They landed on my bushes, on the curving FengShui-approved pathway to my front door, even daringly on the glass-pane of the door. They quickly started filling up the crevices between the stones that make up the circular stonework that holds a single chair where I occasionally sit and read a book.

​Soon the flakes weren’t melting at all, but staying put like a white shroud, covering the ground, every inch of the walkway, every leaf of the bushes. In a few minutes you could see nothing of my green bushes or gray stones; they had all turned milk-white. I looked up at the large oaks and birches that fringe my home. Fall had come and gone, taking away all their vast wealth of leaves. Now their bare branches were all whitewashed and stood in a strange reverse silhouette against gray-indigo sky.
 
Then the snowfall reached its apogee. It started coming down in a prodigal shower. All you could see were large shards of whitest-white snow pouring out of some fairy-tale hopper all over, as far as I could see.  There were spellbound faces of children at other windows, peering at the magical transformation of an ordinary townscape into a wonderland. Everything was white, everything was pure and clean, everything was just perfect. It was beautiful.
 
It snowed the entire day. When I went to bed Tuesday night, I could still hear the soft landing of snowy abundance. And the occasional swishing of a freezing wind wriggling through the trees at the back of my home.
 
Three days have passed. As I walk my usual route, I notice an occasional sliver of snow sticking to a dogwood tree and a melting little pile of dark snow on a street corner. The thick veneer of ice that covered the lake is all gone, with only a small floe or two moving aimlessly with currents.
 
Other people are also moving around. Some are taking their morning constitutional. Some others starting their cars and rushing to work. Many I see at their windows or balconies, drinking their morning coffee, taking a new look at their familiar scene that had looked so unfamiliar three days back.
 
Not a trace left of the enchanted, dreamlike magic show that enveloped our whole world wondrously days ago. Like a true magician, winter pulled a gorgeous white curtain to adorn instantly everything I could see, and, then, with a sweep of its imperial wand, made the mystic curtain disappear forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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