I walk. I love to walk.
 
I run. I drive. I sail. I swim. I fly. But nothing I do as much, as well, as often as I walk. I have no memory of it, but I am told my mother taught me to walk – no doubt when I squatted on her lap far too long. I would have doubtless preferred to remain lazily recumbent on the cozy, comfortable area on her lower torso, but convention dictated that I should learn to step. So she taught me, and I tottered, clumsily I am told, all over the small house in central India where we lived.
 
I never stopped. When we moved to Kolkata, we lived unusually next to some free grounds. I preferred to play football or cricket there, but often I just walked. I walked to my school, a few hundreds of yards away, on Amherst Street, and to a doctor’s clinic, even nearer. As I walked, I watched the streetside shops, selling fruits and cigarettes, their lean vendors and corpulent buyers. I watched the endless pageant of pedestrians going to work, traders hawking their ware, sweating men pulling their rickshaws.
 
When we moved again, to a busier area on College Street, the scene changed. For months I was nostalgic for my old haunts, but soon my memories were swamped by the verve and drama of the new locale. It was like living in the midst of a Kabuki drama. Imagine the tall buildings, the juncture of two main avenues, a college and a university next door, and shops, shops and shops all around. There was a huge market nearby, but the whole area was a giant marketplace. The cacophony was incredible, the buses and trams, the hawkers and salesmen, the garrulous students and gregarious housewives. Even in our second-floor apartment, the windows tightly shut, it took us some time to go to sleep, defying the onslaught of an all-hour orchestra.
 
But I had fun walking the streets. It was the most abominable of places and yet the most exciting of places to walk. There was always a crowd to wade through. In that melee, your pocket could be picked, easily and any time, but I had the singular advantage of an empty pocket. One time I saw a man’s pocket being picked, but the pickpocket saw me too and made a smiling signal to keep quiet. I did, I don’t know now whether intimidated by his brawn or bewitched by his gentle grin.
 
I walked past the phalanx of booksellers on the street, an impressive sight of thousands of books being sold at a pittance of their price and the avid book buyers searching for a deal. To me, everything seemed a deal, but I had no money to buy. But I had the license to pick an alluring book, hold it in my hands for a few precious minutes and read the introduction. For somebody starved for books and ideas, the opportunity seemed heaven-sent.
 
I would walk into the university a few steps ahead and feel I had walked into a different universe. There were fascinating political signs and wallpapers, fervent debates in the students’ lounge or cafeteria and, if I was lucky, a passionate lecture in the halls by some rabble-rouser. Years later I went to same university as a student and got enveloped in politics, but the inspiration came from my aimless but enthusiastic drifting days.

I walked the streets, strayed into narrow lanes, climbed broken steps, walked into parks, and just wandered without purpose. I loved walking and I loved watching the strange cavalcade of people who crossed me, pushed me, walked beside me. Old and young, suave and ill-kempt, hardworking clerks and comely secretaries, busy businessmen and idle vagrants, smoking in a corner and lounging on a bench, they were the princes and paupers of the land, talking, arguing, haggling, singing, they were the magical architects of a vibrant metropolis, who gave it color and meaning and breathed life into its unplanned, meandering, mystifying streets.

​So, decades later, when I drove as much as I walked, it was a body blow when I had to leave for another city in another land. I was leaving because I was in love. That made any loss bearable. When I arrived in Washington, I was again walking, discovering a new city, a very different metropolis where things were structured and organized: numbered roads lay north to south and alphabetical streets ran left to right. An endless procession of cars raced on the road, but the sidewalks, less crowded than Kolkata, had the same colorful pageantry of people, busy men and elegant women, students with rucksacks and mothers with children, nurses carrying bags and workmen carrying drills, delivery men pushing loaded carts and retired veterans in wheelchairs. I began to rediscover my old love of walking. 
 
There was something new too: I was walking with somebody. She was from another town, and to her too the city was new and unknown. We walked together and discovered the city for ourselves, its shops and cafés, parks and roundabouts, its marina and arboretum, its bus stops and metro stations. It seemed a strange, exciting exploration, to find the heart of a city I had never known and where I was yet welcome.
 
Now, years later, I live in an exurb, a planned community, where I live close to a lake, surrounded by woods where oaks and birches flourish, geese swim merrily with their young and herons wait patiently for their prey, deer show their face frequently and foxes and raccoons make their occasional appearance. I walk through the woods, on uneven trails, watch the leaves turn orange and gold with the advent of fall and feel the first few hesitant drops of rain.
 
I am still walking. My dear mother had taught me well.

The pandemic has told us what we already knew. We are lonely.
 
We have occasional flashes of companionship. You are in a long, soggy beer party on a pleasant Saturday with six old friends and, after the fourth long swig, the world suddenly seems full of  warmth and bonhomie.
 
You are at the college reunion and you encounter an old frame who is now married and more rounded, but still evokes an indomitable itch when she stands oh-so-close and gently places a finger on your chest. You know you have great company.
 
Or you are the prized guest at your son’s birthday party and your charming daughter-in-law suddenly drops in your lap their their cuddly two-year-old who starts fidgeting and touching your face. You feel his little fingers on your cheek, but you also feel your heart leaping. You sense the true warmth of companionable company.
 
Those are the special moments when we feel in magnificent human companionship, a few magical moments of genuine connection with other humans. But beer parties are short-lived, reunions do not last for ever, and sons and daughters are busy with their own lives and rarely have the time to link with aging parents. For much of the time, we have to fend for ourselves.
 
That means we have to live with ourselves, in our own orbit, shorn of heart-warming company. Some of our friends have moved; others have become busy with their business and social duties; still others are frail, feeble or hesitant to connect. You can’t blame them, for you understand their problems. And you are left on your own. You are alone.
 
Loneliness is the supreme fact of our existence. How many of us have close friends with whom we enjoy sharing our life? How many couples live without a single word of empathy in a day or a week? How much and how often do we sense that we have nobody with whom to share a special thought or feeling, the strange sensation you had seeing something on television, reading something in a newspaper, hearing something on the telephone? When the miracle happens and you feel a connection, you know ruefully that it is a miracle and unlikely to happen again any time soon.
​
Covid-19 is just a new tough headmaster who has just made explicit the stringent rules of the school. It has no more than made dolefully clear the reality of our individual existence, our straggling in this lonely century in shiny, singular silos, mostly cut off from families, torn from meaningful relationships, bereft of friends who once lightened our loads and brightened our darkest hours.

​Don’t go anywhere where there are people. Don’t go to a coffee shop or a street-corner restaurant. Don’t go to shops or stores, but order stuff online. Don’t sip tea with friends and chat and yak. Don’t even make a group and see a film. In short, have nothing to do with others. Live by yourself. These are the nasty new rules of life – by which we have been living for half a year, and the next half doesn’t look to be any different.
 
This is only a universalization of what has been happening to older people more and more. Where older people are not pushed like domestic animals into a back room, as in some poorer countries, or poorer regions of a rich country, one-third of people over 60 live alone and one-half of people over 80 have a solitary existence. Most of them live long days, sometimes weeks, without human contact. We know well that it makes them more prone to maladies and more vulnerable to a shortened life span.
 
What about the new phenomenon of social media? We don’t know enough yet, but it seems that the beneficiaries are still few in number. One reason may be that many older people haven’t taken to Facebook or Twitter and haven’t the benefit of easy access to the internet. The other is that it takes time to feel part of an active group, active enough to check on you if you have been mute for a while. You get a sense of being involved when you respond to another’s post or, better still, somebody responds to your photo or comment. It takes a bit of skill, however, to evoke a response, even more to get sustained responses over time. Often the links are flimsy and sparse and don’t make up for the warmth of personal presence. The technologies of email and phone help mostly those who already have a decent enough nexus with their friends or relatives.
 
The pandemic has devastated our economies and our health, brought tragedy to a huge number of families. The profound loss may be a shock enough to wake us to the reality of a bigger tragedy that growing steadily in our society: of creeping, insidious, cruel loneliness that silently kills first our souls and then our bodies.

​Are you absolutely sure of something? You are certain that you saw a blue car hit a boy in a red shirt on the street corner last week. You are certain that your boss denied you promotion five years back because he was partial to a person from his ethnic community. You are certain that, because you have greased the palm of a dozen priests and had a half-dozen goats slaughtered to please some bloodthirsty divinity, you have a reserved apartment in heaven.
 
If you are absolutely sure of something, then you are absolutely wrong. I read that declaration in Bertrand Russell when I was a kid and it deflated, like a decrepit tire, many of my cherished certainties. Let me do you a favor and pass on the same disillusionment to you. The chances are: a half-witted lawyer can easily punch six holes in your testimony about the street accident; your boss simply didn’t think your work up to the par, expecting greater diligence from you; there is no reservation in your name in paradise, not even a one-room studio – if the hereafter has a dubious place such as paradise at all.

It is not surprising that our minds crave for certainties. It makes life simpler and it gives us peace of mind. But it also creates a constant temptation to fall into the arms of a myth that our parents or teachers lovingly bestowed or we ourselves fabricated for our solace. Because we care for some people, we swallow, wholesale, the prejudices and falsities they have received from their dear ones and passed on to us. Because we want easy answers and cannot face the reality that there is much to be explored and studied before we can arrive at reliable anwers, we embrace the untruths like a child’s frayed yet much-loved toy.
 
I have never been able to let go of a phrase I read in Aldous Huxley who spoke of “that infinitely complex and mysterious thing called absolute reality.” What is the reality of the antique chair I am sitting on? Is it simply a construct of wood and fabric? A literate schoolboy today can drive a hole through that view. He will talk of particles and atoms and energy and motion, and leave me hopelessly confounded. Somebody knowledgeable can also tell me that I understand nothing of the chair unless I perceive its complex design. Perhaps a master craftsman of India made the blueprint and a rotund Maharaja modified it to adapt to a royal tradition. Its very history, from the princely warehouse to an auctioneer to my plebean abode in the US, perhaps lends another layer of mystery to this chair. To pretend that I know and understand all about this chair would be pathetically false.
 
Now Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who performed the neat trick of winning the Nobel Prize for economics, drives a large truck through our notion of absolute certainty. With a great variety of experiments, Kahneman demonstrates that there is a huge difference between what we experience and what we remember. We think we remember the experience, but in fact we remember only some small parts of that experience that give a partial and misleading recall of the experience. Our mind has a hard time remembering the whole experience, its many details, and it uses a short-cut by remembering mostly two things: something that was striking and something that happened at the end. If you ate and drank in a restaurant for three hours, all you remember is that the waiter was very polite and the dessert he served as his last flourish was excellent. You will judge the entire dining experience superlative because the ‘peak’ and ‘end’ experiences were good, despite the fact that the five-course dinner, including the main dish, was mediocre.
 
You realize how disastrous can be the effect of the trick your mind habitually plays on your judgment. You think you went to a good college only because in the final year you encountered a kind and helpful professor. The standard of the college was otherwise pathetic. Or you think your father was a great person because in the last year of his life he bequeathed all his assets to you, dispossessing his eldest son. You overlook that he was a petty, peeved man who did great injustice to your elder brother. Perhaps the fact that you were a beneficiary in both cases colors your judgment, but a major factor in either case was the key experience in the final phases.
 
The fact is that our mind is not an impartial umpire but a tendentious observer. It tricks us into conclusions that are false and misleading – unless we are alert to its treacherous nature and guard against it. A very perceptive friend once told me, “When I say I love my wife, what does it really mean? It certainly does not mean that I love her all the time, always at fever pitch, to the fullest extent. More likely, it means that I adore her 30 percent of the time, I like her 40 percent of the time, I find her reasonably pleasant 20 percent of the time, I regard her tolerable 7 percent of the time and 3 percent of the time I think her quite insufferable. My so-called love for her is not a universal soaring sentiment at all, but the weighted average of all these different feelings that I have for her at different times.”
 
The fact is that we are not and cannot be sure of many things about which we pretend to a degree of certainty. That pretension is to give ourselves some comfort. We like to believe that we have certainty about our political, religious and social views, which are often half-baked notions we have imbibed from dubious sources. It makes the world a simpler, clearer, more reassuring place.
 
But, surely, that is a weakling’s craving for mental peace and comfort. The stronger man abandons such pretension and faces the uncertainty of life. Camus said, “I will not bow to ask of a cross the peace to which my weakness beckons me.” Let us hope a few of us will choose truth over comfort.

​When I arrive in the morning, Monica, my daughter, is in her home. Probably cooking or doing some other chore. But somebody else is there to receive me. Penny, her daughter. Nobody had appointed her to receive me or made her the master of ceremonies. She simply spots me from the front door and rushes out as the official greeter.
 
Penny has an impressive formal name with many syllables. Followed by a middle name. I have problems with long names and stick to Penny. That suits her slight, elfin look. She has just completed three years. Her yellow frock sets off her small frame and a pair of radiant brown eyes. She has beautiful silken blonde hair. Lest those undisciplined locks get into her eyes, Monica ties some back in a small tuft. It turns every which way as she runs out to me.
 
In the time it takes me to park the car and get out with a handbag, she swiftly crosses the porch, negotiates the steps and reaches me. She has a big smile on her face. It is not because she is greatly attached to me. I come so rarely that I am scarcely a very familiar face. She has observed my interaction with her mother and knows that her mother has a special bond with me. She has inferred that she too is rather special for me. Her enthusiasm to greet me promptly has something to do with that.
 
She quickly reassures me, “Mommy is inside,” and adds, before I could ask, “Daddy is upstairs.” And before I could make a move toward the entrance, she comes closer to examine my car.
 
“It is blue,” she offers a well-considered judgment. From her smile, I infer that my car has received her approval. She points to two other cars in the parking area, “That is mommy’s car. That one is Daddy’s.”
 
With that, her interest in locomotion ends. She points to two small birds sitting on the long cable line. As if in response to our interest, one of the birds – may be both – give a brief but spirited chirp. That feisty blast is not lost on little Penny.
 
“They are hungry,” she promptly concludes, “they haven’t had their breakfast.”
 
“You may be right, Penny,” I say doubtfully. I know nothing of birds’ dietary routine.

Penny promptly takes my words as an affirmation of the birds’ need for nourishment.
 
She says, “Come with me.”
 
In a few minutes, she has gathered a handful of berries from her parents’ garden on the front lawn. She wants me to help. Together we gather what should be enough to feed, not two, two dozen birds or more. Now Penny wants the berries to be placed on the sidewalk in a box pattern. “They are very hungry,” she tells me. “They will love this breakfast.”
 
She would have doubtless wanted us to stand aside and watch if the birds came to make a feast of the berries she so carefully arranged for them. But, at that moment, appeared Monica at the entrance door.
 
“Oh, you have already come!” She comes forward and kisses me. It is lovely to see my daughter again and hug her.
 
“I was looking for Penny in the house and couldn’t find her,” she says. “That’s why I came out to see if she was on the porch. Good that she was with you.”
 
“She was very busy trying to arrange a decent breakfast for birds,” I explain.
 
Monica smiles. She knows her daughter well. She says, “Well, I have arranged breakfast for us all. Let us get going before it gets cold.”

She has waffles for us adults and oatmeal for Penny. Penny was hungry and loves her oatmeal, which has a sprinkling of honey. She finishes it fast and extends her bowl for another helping. Now I can better understand why she thinks the birds must have been hungry for their breakfast.
 
It is a beautiful, bright, leisurely Saturday morning. Monica or her husband does not have to go to work. We sit and drink coffee together for a long time. We chat and Penny joins us with her occasional comments. Her mother has served her a bowl of grapes and, with great generosity, she offers me a couple of them. Taking them from her little hand, the grapes taste better than any grape I have ever had.
 
Monica suggests I stay back and have lunch with them. We decide we will all have pizza and I confess my weakness for pepperoni pizzas. But, I tell them, I have to go out and do a few chores before I come back for the pizza treat.

I kiss Penny before I go out. As I step out the door and walk to the car, I notice as many as four birds hovering near the garden. Two look content, appearing to have had a decent breakfast, and the other two are still finishing their meal. Yes, the berries Penny so considerately left for them on the sidewalk.

​500 miles separate me from my daughters.
 
I live in Washington, on the east coast; they live in Charleston, in the deep south. I have a house there too, but it seems a stretch to think of it as home, so rarely I am there. I no longer enjoy driving the distance at one go, and so going there entails planning ahead and using a hotel as a midway stop.
 
The bigger reason for my rare trips is that I have become accustomed to my house and my town. It is a pleasant enough house, larger than my needs. I rarely use a floor, and I am content using only the kitchen, a bathroom and the large bedroom I have made my study. A smaller bedroom I use only to sleep in and the deck outside is my favorite haunt, to read and to daydream.
 
Even the city, Washington, though I live outside its limits, has its fascination for me. It is a busy city, always vibrant, resonant with memories of the places where I have lived, worked, eaten, met with friends, watched plays, heard concerts. Its streets mean something for me, its hotels have memories for me, its old buildings fascinate me. Its free museums are an eternal charm, its think tanks with their talks and debates never fail to draw me.
 
Yet my daughters are there. At 500 miles. Every time I see them my heart takes a leap.
 
My life is peaceful. My work was just the opposite. I started with business, but in a sizable corporation. So life wasn’t topsy-turvy from day to day, my livelihood did not depend on a weekly revenue. Yet clashes and conflicts were a daily occurrence. The uncertainties of life are one thing, but another thing was the personal fights, turf wars and departmental skirmishes. When I went to work for an international organization, these clashes were compounded by ethnic biases and national discords. These came into the open when I started my diplomatic career. Little prejudices and large assumptions lay behind the gloss and glitter. It amazed me that big people seemed to have such small minds. Large issues remained unresolved because of petty antagonisms.
 
Now I live a comparatively tranquil life. It is largely a life of quiet study, sustained exploration and a peaceful probe of troubling matters. I am happy in my home, relaxed in my fitful interviews and at home when I travel to unfamiliar shores. But it is all by myself. If I am happy, there is scantly anyone to share my happiness with.
 
My daughters are 500 miles away. In another world.
 
Of course, I love to see them. I take breaks from whatever I do, and spend a few days with them. I would have preferred them to be a little nearer; I could drive over and visit them more often. The distance is a bit more than I care to drive in a day, ten to eleven hours. The pandemic makes it harder. I am forced to stay in a hotel overnight, where it is not easy to avoid other people in a confined space or maintain social distance.
 
For months I have not seen my daughters. I speak to them on the phone, even see them periodically on my computer. I miss feeling close to them. I miss holding their hands or hugging them. They tell me of the improvements they have made in their homes. They have bought shiny new cars. I haven’t seen any of those. It frustrates me, even when they send me photographs or try to show me on the phone. I am old-fashioned enough to want to see it all directly, standing next to my daughters, and be able to tell them what I think of them. I want to be able to share, in my limited way, their life with me. I want to feel a part of their fast-changing life.
 
But they live 500 miles away. An intolerably large space in the middle.
 
No longer. Last week I took a decision. The decision to take a risk and drive the 500 miles and visit them. A decent hotel offered to give me a room, fully sanitized and safe, exempt from any service or maintenance staff.  I stayed there a cautious night and drove the rest of the distance through the deep south to Charleston.
 
As I came closer, every hour I said to myself I am an hour closer to my daughters. The drive seemed easy, the traffic insignificant. I drove steadily, reluctant to stop at the inviting rest stops on the way, and finally entered Charleston.
 
For my convenience, they are both waiting in my Charleston home. They have brought food, plenty of food. They have chilled the wine. They have placed the covers and cutlery on the large dining table. But first I must hug them and kiss them and see at close range their beautiful faces. They are smiling and my heart is bursting. What did I do to deserve such loving, charming daughters!
 
But, wait, what else have they placed on the table? A large cake, a big, luscious birthday cake. They remembered it was my birthday! I invite my daughter’s tousle-haired little girl, just three, to come and help me dice the cake. Excited, laughing, she comes and places her soft little hand on mine and steadies the knife before it enters the large cake.
 
All the 500 miles have simply melted away, like the butter and sugar in my cake.
​

The story is told in Buddhist literature of two monks, one young and the other older, traveling from village to village in summer spreading the word. They were about to cross a shallow river when they saw a young woman wanting to cross it too but uncertain of its depth, fearful that she might drown. The older monk chivalrously asked the woman to piggyback on him and crossed the river with her.
 
On the other shore, once she had climbed down, thanked and left, the younger monk commented that it was unseemly for a monk to carry a young woman in that intimate fashion. The older monk said simply that he had tried to help her.
 
They continued on their way and walked many miles when the young monk again said,
“Don’t you think it is not right for a monk to bodily carry a young woman like that?”
 
The older man said, “Look, I unloaded that woman at least ten miles ago. You seem to be still carrying her and can’t unburden yourself.”

​It is an amusing story and it made me wonder what burdens we carry and can’t seem, ever, far beyond ten miles or ten years, to dispose of. Perhaps it is a burden bending us down with its weight and making us miss beautiful things on the way, but we have never considered laying it down for good. What was once a burden has become an attachment; we can’t live without it. The much-maligned alcoholic at least makes an addiction of a joy. Much worse, we make an addiction of a misery.
 
When I look back at my life, I am taken aback by at least three types of burden that I have a hard time putting behind me.
 
The first is the temptation to hover over injustices done to me. These are the cases where, at least in my mind, there was a villain who did something wrong and caused me harm. Everyone can think of a villain like that, in the family, at work or in the community. I had a cousin who came to stay with us and stole the pocket money I had earned by tutoring. I can remember lazy bosses who loaded their work on me, corrupt bosses who undermined my decisions to curry favor with clients or suppliers, unscrupulous bosses who passed off my painstakingly crafted reports as their own. I have encountered my share of racist cops in the US and pompous bureaucrats in India. For years, their rudeness and dishonesty have rankled with me and the memory has weighed with me.
 
The second kind of burden on my mind has been my regret for bad decisions I have made from time to time. Here I can blame only myself. I am the villain. That doesn’t make it any easier for my peace of mind. I keep remembering how foolishly I made a wrong choice and bought, in one case, the wrong car most unsuitable for the hilly country I was going to. I think repeatedly of the construction worker who took a large advance for fixing the roof of my home and then just disappeared. I recall annoyedly the absurdly high speed in which I drove in the Virginia countryside and had to spend three hours in the court and pay the sky-high fine. Irritatingly, these memories continue to return periodically and make me wonder how foolish and gullible I can be.
 
Then there are the bad things that have happened to me for no reason and recur in my mind now and then. Here there is no identifiable source of my pain; fate or providence, if you like, is the villain. The time on a plane a flight attendant dropped a whole pot of warm coffee on my lap. Or the time my bank slipped in making a timely payment for my hospital bills, with a downturn in my credit score. Or the times I seem to get broken eggs in the egg cartons I bring from the local store. Trivial things, I know, but they keep coming up in my mind and arouse the common, carping question, Why me. It feels singularly unfair to have all this heaped on me.
 
When I talk to friends, neighbors and colleagues I hear them so often complaining of the same kinds of things. After hearing them for a while, I get tired and I feel like saying, “My dear fellow, all this has already happened. Why keep calling it up and moaning about it? Such things happen.” I remain silent, partly because I want to be polite, but partly also because an uncomfortable thought has occurred to me. I realize that I am not alone in carrying these burdens. Others have their miserable loads too, and I am just like them in clinging to my private burdens.
 
The resolutely pious among us may find it hard to accept it but bad things happen, and happen frequently, to good people – just as, infuriatingly, good things happen to bad people we know. It is a question of letting bad thing so scar us that we have difficulty accepting or appreciating good things when they come. If we let that happen, we have done to ourselves something worse than what our worst enemies could design.
 
It may not be a bad idea to listen to the older monk and leave aside what we have long silently borne, the onerous cargo of our past miseries, mistakes and misadventures, embrace the present joys and walk unburdened into a radiant future of our choice.

It is perhaps the fault of my undistinguished antecedents that I don’t think much of rich people. I live in the metropolitan Washington area, where there are over 500,000 millionaires. You can’t help but encounter them once in a while. I find many of them dull and uninteresting at the best, and demonstrative, even boorish, at the worst. If they wouldn’t flaunt their oversize houses and overequipped cars, they would subtly refer to their positions in companies and foundations, their power and connections in society. However, there is one rich, now-not-so-rich non-Washingtonian I would love to meet.
 
Stephen Leacock has a comic story of a rich and famous stockbroker who wanted to get rid of his money in the way that came easiest to him. By selling good stocks and buying bad stocks. The problem was, the moment he sold good stocks, people thought those stocks would depreciate and sold them in droves. Naturally, stock prices went down and he in effect became much richer by selling ahead of a declining market. When he bought bad stocks, the second the word spread, people rushed to buy quantities of those shares, their prices skyrocketed and he involuntarily made lots of money. The stockbroker never could reduce his wealth and kept on getting richer.
 
It is a comic story because our experience is that the poor want to become rich, and the rich, unlike Leacock’s unusual stockbroker, never want to turn poor. It is so easy to answer the question who wants to be a millionaire: everybody. The answer is easy, but it is wrong.
 
Let me tell you who doesn’t want to be a millionaire. In fact, he was much more than a millionaire. He was worth $8 billion, according to the Forbes magazine’s well-researched listing of the world richest people. Now Forbes reports that he has achieved his unusual ambition: he has given away the $8 billion.

Charles Feeney came from a modest Irish American family and made his fortune in the sixties, at a time when duty-free selling was not widely known, by creating a vast network of duty-free stores in airports and strategic cities. But, as his wealth grew, he conceived the idea of giving it away and started The Atlantic Philanthropies so that he could do it without fanfare. He began quietly moving all his money to the foundation.
 
Education and health were his favorite areas because he believed he could make a visible difference to people’s lives. He made the biggest donation to his school that it had ever received and gave $1 billion to his university, Cornell. He added another $3.5 million as his last gift so that Cornell could start a technical campus on New York’s Roosevelt Island. He also donated $1 billion to universities in Ireland.
 
He donated $700 million to improve healthcare and $176 million to the Global Brain Health Institute, and, most unexpectedly, gave $270 million to Vietnam to improve its public health. I particularly like that he gave $870 million to improve human rights and bring about social change. He donated $62 million for my favorite cause, the abolition of an atrocious relic, the death penalty, and gave $76 million to President Obama’s effort to extend health services in the US.
 
Dramatically but worthily, Forbes calls him the James Bond of Philanthropy. Because his style of charity was not only unorthodox, it was also secret. Unlike most donors who have their names inscribed on the receiving institution’s wall or even have a building renamed, Feeney made generous donations but left it open for other donors’ name to be publicized. He loathed blowing his horn.
 
While he was giving away millions, he lived in a rented apartment and owned neither a house nor a car. He is now 89 but travels always in the economy class and wears a $10 Casio watch. He has kept a small sum of money to live on, for himself and his wife, and donated his entire wealth.
 
Feeney’s biggest contribution may have been an idea. Rich people, if they give at all, set up a foundation that disburses to charities after their death. Feeney spurned the idea and started giving money to causes he believed in and happily watched its proper use and beneficial results. His astounding example prompted Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to start their famous campaign, Giving while Living, to persuade the rich to give up a half of their wealth to help the needy.
 
Why am I writing about Charles Feeney, a man I have never seen or met? Because his is the kind of breathtaking story I love to read and to share. Because my heart lifts and my spirit soars to think of a man, one of the richest in the world, whose joy has been getting rid of his money and helping the helpless, in his own country and in others. His generosity has been matchless and incredible; he gave until there was nothing left to give.
 
Maybe his story will inspire a few others, especially those who live in opulent mansions a stone’s throw from brutal slums – in India all such mansions are not far from such slums – to look around and give a moment’s thought to the malnourished child who has never known a decent meal, the penniless student who dreams of going to college, the pregnant village girl whose life is in mortal danger for want of safe rudimentary help. Maybe this story will prompt some rich person to think a little differently and such ordinary people will finally get the help they badly need – just in time.

The immediacy of life often gives us a sense of drama, a feeling that something interesting is happening to us, but it does not give us a sense of perspective. We don’t realize at the moment how important an event is, how it is going to affect our lives. This is perhaps even more true of people we encounter. We may like a person, or not like the person so much, but often have no clue about how that encounter might have a lasting impression on our mind.
 
Fifty years ago, I was a young college student taking a long train trip to central India. It was a bit of an adventure. I was born in Nagpur and lived some initial years there. Now my family lived in Kolkata, but, come vacation time, we traveled often to Nagpur to visit my aunts who lived and worked there. What made it an adventure in my mind this time was I was traveling alone for the first time. My mother had some concerns, but my father sided with me and felt I could do it without a mishap.
 
He had offered to come with me to the railway station, but I insisted that I would take a bus by myself. I said my suitcase was small and light, but the real reason was I wanted to feel mature enough to do it all by myself. The huge crowd waiting for the train was intimidating; it seemed the whole town was going west. When the train came, the jostle-and-shove to board was awful. What saved me was that the porter I had hired, a wiry and sturdy man with a blue shirt and a red turban, nimbly jumped into the compartment, occupied a seat and then hollered for me to follow his athletic feat. I fought my way in and gratefully took the seat he offered. This apparently was the protocol for securing a seat in an unreserved compartment.
 
After I had paid and generously tipped my lithe savior, I heaved a sigh of relief and looked for a way to store by my light-but-not-so-small suitcase that stood awkwardly in the passage. Where to put it? The upper bunk was packed with myriad suitcases, bags and bundles. I spotted a small opening next to a green suitcase, but I needed to move it to a side before my blue baggage could fit.
 
I didn’t want an angry reaction from the owner of the dislodged suitcase. I faced the other passengers near me and meekly asked whose suitcase it was. It was then that I noticed the person who answered. She was a young woman with a long braid of hair, with an open book in her hands. She wore a plain white sari with a green border that matched her green blouse. As she agreed to let me move her suitcase, with a quiet smile, no less, she seemed winsome to me, despite the serious look her rimless glasses gave her.
 
I thanked her and, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, asked her what she was reading. I had a surprise when she let me see the book. It was a collection of Rabindranath’s stories, in English. When I wondered what had interested her to read it, I got to know more about her.

She said she lived and had just started college in Nagpur. She had read a story by Rabindranath, translated into Marathi, her first language, in a local journal and it had intrigued her. She had to visit Kolkata for a family wedding and decided to get the English translation of his stories she found easily in a bookstore.
 
That got us talking for a while, for I immediately recognized six of the stories that I had read in Bengali. I loved the way she talked. She spoke softly, modestly, but there was no mistaking her firm perceptions about the characters. When I jokingly said that she reminded me of the heroine in a Rabindranath novel, she eagerly wrote down the title of the book, meaning to locate it.
 
I was so wrapped in the conversation that I had forgotten my mother had packed some sandwiches for me. When the other passengers started on dinner, I offered to share my sandwiches with her. She seemed to have better stuff and she graciously shared her provisions with me.
 
I don’t know how long we talked, but I remember that all the passengers went to sleep one by one. We attracted attention as we kept talking, but we lowered our voices. The lights dimmed. A cool breeze came through the windows. She passed me one end of the long shawl that she had at one point wrapped around her shoulder. I felt close to her.
 
We were tired but we didn’t want to stop our exchanges. She would whisper a comment and I would whisper back. By then we were muttering just a few words, less to say anything than to tell the other that we were there for the other. That is my strongest recollection of the quiet, magnetic person I had met by chance.
 
When I woke, the train had stopped at some station and other passengers were ordering tea from hawkers on the platform. She was still sleeping. I had a cup of tea by myself.
 
She had clearly not slept much at the wedding house, and came awake late as the train was entering a junction station where it would stop for twenty minutes. We both ordered a modest lunch and ate together.
 
When the train entered the large Nagpur station in the afternoon, there was the typical bedlam of passengers, porters and people who had come to collect their relatives or friends. I saw her surrounded by four persons eagerly collecting her green suitcase and her handbag, while I was being hugged by my aunts. We looked at each other. Did she make a gesture to say she was still thinking of me? It seemed so, but I wasn’t sure.
 
I never saw her again. I never again spoke a word to her. We had been innocently negligent to share contact details. Yet, even after fifty years, there remains the vivid, enduring memory of a pretty woman, with a long braid, who wore a white sari and spoke softly but surely, and reminded me of a sad, self-possessed heroine of an unforgettable novel.

I had just spent three pleasant days with an old friend, Dietrich, in his second-floor apartment in Chicago. We visited museums, splurged in restaurants, explored the streets and talked endlessly. Since he had to catch a flight very early the following day, Saturday, he suggested that I sleep longer, have a decent brunch somewhere and catch an evening shuttle back to Washington.
 
Saturday afternoon I dressed and packed, deciding to leave early for the airport. Suddenly there was a call from a cousin, whom I had met a day earlier, saying he had to come to the hospital after a car accident. I rushed out, took a taxi and went to see him. Fortunately, the doctor said he would be fine in a day or two. I returned to my friend’s apartment to pick up my suitcase and leave for the airport.

​No suitcase. I realized with a shock as I searched the apartment. I had left in such a rush that I could not recollect precisely what I had done with the suitcase. I hadn’t left it in the apartment surely; it would have been there otherwise, for I had the only key besides Dietrich. I must have rolled it out of the apartment into the foyer and absentmindedly left it unattended before rushing out to the hospital.
 
In that case, I reasoned, it must be with the building’s caretaker, who spotted an unattended suitcase and took charge of it. Or a resident reported the item to him and the caretaker gathered it. I felt sure that, in either case, it would be safely in storage, for it was a well-guarded apartment building. Then came the shattering discovery that it wasn’t in storage either. The caretaker searched high and low with me. No suitcase. I had to leave for the airport without the suitcase.
 
It was a disaster. The clothes I lost and the gifts I had bought for friends was a financial loss, no more. But the loss of a large number of documents and work papers was a major concern. It was professionally awkward and embarrassing. It took me more than two months and enormous expense to retrieve store cards, change credit cards, get a new passport, get an extra pair of glasses and sunglasses, order new suits and shirts, pajamas and shoes.
 
Ten weeks later I again had some work in Chicago and Dietrich invited me for a drink. He listened quietly when I told him of my misadventure and the mystery of the missing suitcase.
 
Pensively, he commented, “Since you are sure you didn’t take the suitcase with you to the hospital – why would you! – and it wasn’t in the apartment, it must have been left in the foyer. Yet the caretaker did not find it. An outsider cannot get in and certainly cannot leave with a large suitcase.”
 
He pondered with furrowed brows, “Where could the suitcase be, I wonder.”
 
I was about to say that it was a closed chapter when Dietrich stood up and beckoned me to follow. He walked out of the apartment into the foyer and looked at the entrance of the three other apartments on the floor. He thought for a few seconds, chose the nearest apartment and rang the bell.
 
A young woman opened the door ajar.
 
“Karen, this is my friend who stayed with me three months ago. He lost a suitcase on this floor, a black Samsonite. Any chance you could have seen it.”
 
Karen opened the door a little more to let us enter and then pointed to a corner, “This thing was blocking my way to the elevator. I pushed it there.”
 
It was my suitcase.
 
Dietrich’s jaws tightened, “It never occurred to you to report it to the caretaker? Not in three months! Do you realize the misery and loss you caused, quite unnecessarily, for my friend?”
 
We left brusquely as Karen kept muttering apologies.
 
I flew back home with the suitcase the next day. Three days later a note arrived by mail from Karen.
 
“I got your address from Dietrich. I am sorry for what I did. I know regrets are no use. Please try to forgive me. It may help you to do so if you know that a man I expected to marry for seven years told me that very morning that he was leaving me for another woman. I was not myself.”
 
I was not Sherlock Holmes but I could have said “Elementary” to Dr. Watson. The curious case of the missing suitcase was finally solved.

In Woody Allen’s lesser-known film, September, Stephanie consoles Lane, who has just lost her lover to another woman, “Soon you will leave here, start over again in New York. There will be a million things to keep you busy. It’s going to be okay.”
 
Is this true? Can we plug a hole in our heart with work, new duties, adjusting to a new place and probably a new job, gaining new colleagues and new friends?

​There is no dearth of effort to do just that. The pain of loss is acute enough to spur us to look for relief. We are ready to do anything that would give us a moment of peace. Some, of course, think of hurting the person who has caused so much pain; a few do – only to find that it does little to remove the anguish. Pain is pain, and it stays that way, no matter what vengeful things we plan or execute.
 
If you have lost a love, the ancient counsel was, go to a seashore or the mountains. Let nature take care of your grief. Today the options are more – and more varied. You can take a discount flight to the Mediterranean or Caribbeans. Recently I took a cruise to San Juan and Saint Kitts and could see the point of a change of air. Thousands flock there for a bracing change when there is a nip in the air.
 
You don’t have to be a person of leisure to do that. Now that much of the world is working online, you could probably attend to network collapse or client discontent from a table in the sand or the deck chair on a cruise ship.
 
Devarajan, an Indian American techie who lives near me, shared his pain that his wife, Sova, left him and started living with an Armenian colleague who worked on the next desk. He knew neither how to share the news with his family and friends in India nor how to face the ignominy of talking politely with his marauding colleague. “I went for a long trip in Italy, which was distracting. But, sadly, not distracting enough. I would be eating pasta roadside and would suddenly feel lonely and dejected. It was worse when I returned to my hotel at night.” He returned a week early to go back, miserably, to his accustomed desk.
 
Siobhan, an Irish redhead I meet often at the local library, told me of her equally humiliating experience of being practically abandoned on the church steps in New York, three days before a meticulously planned wedding to be followed by a lavish reception. She couldn’t bear to continue in the city and hurriedly took a job in Washington. “I like the relative isolation. None of the old friends, old associations. I live among strangers and, for months, carefully keep them as strangers. I had to adjust to an unfamiliar city while coping with an untried job. The stress gave me some relief in the initial months, but in two months I felt my depression returning. I cope as best as I can.”
 
Both avoided relations and friends and tried to fill their life with endless errands. It brought little solace beyond some distraction. We don’t always get what we want. Rather, with rare exceptions, what we want we don’t get. I wanted to study literature or philosophy, I spent years studying economics. I wanted to be a jurist or journalist, I ended up an executive and diplomat. Not unlike what happened to many friends.
 
I suspect many don’t realize the frustration of their desires because they never clearly articulate their desires, even to themselves. If you haven’t given a thought to what you want, you don’t notice that you aren’t moving anywhere close to it. It is truest when it comes to our heart’s desires. A vast number of people start relationships with people near at hand, someone who works with them, lives near them, knows their friends or relations. No wonder the relationships don’t always work out well.
 
What do we do then?
 
If you don’t want to turn your face away from life – as some do and turn pathetically to a cult or religion, or worse, a specious swami or bogus guru – but find meaning and pleasure in life itself, you have to find something that does not depend on anybody else or any outside event.
 
Professor Kowalski, a friend, tells me, “It takes a bit of doing. You have to think hard and settle on something that you truly enjoy. Is it music? Is it gardening? Is it cooking new things? Do more of it, learn more about it, fill your life with what gives you genuine and abundant pleasure. Whether it is writing poetry or playing the guitar, it can be your own source of peace and happiness. Nobody can snatch it away.”
 
The pain will always be with us. Heartaches will come our way, repeatedly. Relatives will prove insincere, friends will let us down, children will disappoint us. But nobody will be able to take away our joy in sketching a tree or singing a song. And that joy will last and grow, no matter whatever else goes wrong in our life. I may not be able to cure the world’s sorrow, but I can create my happiness. That is what we can live for.